It is baffling why Poland’s nationalist-controlled Parliament would mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp on Polish soil — with a needless, foolish and insulting draft bill that would penalize any suggestion of complicity by the Polish state or the Polish nation in the Nazi death machine.

Apart from raising the very questions about the role of the Poles in the Holocaust that the drafters apparently want to hide, are we not past such self-serving posturing over one of history’s greatest crimes? Whatever dubious motives are behind this measure, Poland would do well to erase it as quickly as possible.

No doubt it pains Poles, whose country was overrun and occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II, when foreigners refer to Auschwitz and other extermination centers the Nazis set up in Poland as “Polish death camps.” They were Nazi death camps. Along with three million Polish Jews — about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust — at least 1.9 million Polish gentiles were killed. Some Poles tried to help Jews and have been recognized as “righteous among nations.”

Yet it is also undeniable that Poles were directly or indirectly complicit in the crimes committed on their land and that Poles were guilty of anti-Jewish pogroms during and after the war. These are the facts of that terrible history, and the Poles, like all other nations conquered by Germany that became embroiled in the Nazi atrocities, have an obligation to the victims and to the future to seek the full truth, however painful.