From 1939 to 1945, about six million Poles were killed, half of whom were ethnic Jews. Although many Poles saved Jews at their own peril, others participated in pogroms that killed hundreds or betrayed their Jewish neighbors.

According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, more than 6,800 Polish gentiles risked their lives to save Jews, which is more than from any other European country.

The use of the phrase “Polish death camp” has resulted in mea culpas from journalists and politicians for years. In 2012, President Barack Obama was harshly rebuked by Poland’s prime minister for using the term, and the White House responded by expressing regret for the “misstatement.”

The New York Times has made the same error on several occasions, including in one version of an article earlier this week about the Palij case. The Times’s stylebook directs its journalists to avoid the term.

The Polish government’s scrutiny of this language has been going on for years, said Geneviève Zubrzycki, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who has written about how Poland remembers the Holocaust.

But now that the country has a law that bans the phrase, people are paying attention to how it might be enforced.

“Everyone is looking at what the Polish government will do now that it has this law,” she said.

Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, told lawmakers in June that he expected publishers in the United States or Germany to think again before they use phrases like “Polish concentration camps” because they might fear a resulting lawsuit.