Polish Anti-defamation Law

Debate between Lord Mann and Stephen Pound

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

We can learn a lot from cemeteries. When I visited eastern Poland with a Jewish family to look at their historical roots there, we visited the Jewish cemetery. It was not in a particularly good state—I do not think anybody had visited it for many decades—but what struck me was how big it was, because the village had been largely Jewish.

I had research done into that family’s history, and I got photographs that showed the village. They raise the question about what happened to the properties. Three million Poles were murdered, which means 3 million properties disappeared, plus the communal buildings such as the synagogues. What happened to them? We can learn a lot from looking at cemeteries about what happened and who did or did not do what at any time.

There are plenty of people living in that village, but none of them are Jewish. That is not a surprise. There were 3 million Jewish Poles; there are now under 1,000. It is a thriving rural village, like many others in Poland, with a Jewish graveyard. People live in the same village, on the same streets, sometimes in the same properties, and certainly on the same land.

History can be interpreted in different ways. Let us be quite clear: this law has not come from nowhere, so those who have been protesting about it, such as Netanyahu, should have opened their mouths when the first such law was brought in by Hungary in 2010. That law criminalised the wrong interpretation of history and came with a three-year maximum prison sentence.

As Hungary attempted to legally define its history in 2010, Lithuania did too. Its law was more generous, with only two years’ imprisonment, but at the same time, Lithuania attempted to arrest two women over the age of 90: Fania Brantsovsky and Rachel Margolis. Most people, including me, would describe them as war heroes. They fought with the resistance in the Lithuanian forest. They undoubtedly killed people, but they were fighting alongside the Soviets, who came in and eventually liberated that country as part of the war effort. In 2010, Lithuania attempted to arrest those two war heroes for being war criminals. They were fighting for the resistance—it is unambiguous; there is no argument about what happened—but they went from war heroes to war criminals, and Lithuania attempted to jail them.

In 2014, Latvia brought in a law that came with five years in prison. In different ways, Ukraine and Estonia brought in criminal laws in advance of Poland, so this legislation has not come from nowhere. In Austria, there are people who attempt to describe Mauthausen as a Polish camp. Actually, I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound): it is very rare to hear the Nazi death camps in Poland described as Polish, just like it is very rare to hear death camps elsewhere described as anything other than death camps by their names, but it happens and it has happened for a period of time. Why were those camps there? They were where the Jewish population was.

There were differences in Ukraine. Ukrainians took the jobs and murdered the people. That did not happen in Poland. They did not recruit Poles to do that. They did in Lithuania. They did not bother with the camps. The Lithuanians took Jewish people out into the forest and shot them to save time and money. They did not need the Germans to do it. But who were the Nazis in all that? Who were the Nazis in Lithuania? Who were the nationalists? Who was on the side of Lithuania?

Starting with a conference in Hungary in 2008, with the European Parliament as a conduit, a group of politicians has co-ordinated and drawn together other nationalist politicians, including from Poland, to rewrite history. That is what has been going on. The example of Lithuania, and the rest of the Baltic states, is the simplest one, and in essence it says, “We weren’t fighting for anyone, other than fighting the Communists. There was a double genocide”—that term was created at the 2008 conference. “The Nazis and the communists are equally bad. The communists controlled our country and did many evil things under Stalin and beyond.” That is true; that is factually the case.

I was the first person to leave Poland with a Solidarność badge in 1980—that is a different story, which I will leave for now—so I am very aware of what the Soviets and the communists did in eastern Europe, but the problem is putting together those two genocides and describing them as if they were equal and comparable. There is an academic in Latvia who has taken it further and brought in blood libel as well. The logic goes, “My grandfather did nothing wrong, because my grandfather was a patriot. He was not supporting the Nazis. He was fighting the communists. By the way, who speaks Russian? The communists. Who speaks Russian in our country? The Jews speak Russian. Rachel Margolis speaks Russian.”

Therefore, it is possible to distort history so quickly and so easily—rewrite your own history and the history for every country, including our country and our role, as the country that failed to take in Jewish migrants in the ’30s and, indeed, after the war, in the ’40s. This country turned them away. We can all rewrite our history, sanitise our role in things and glorify what we were good at—the little bits. “Oh, we had the Kindertransport here. Weren’t we brilliant?” We let a few Jews slip in. What about the rest?

Well, that is what is going on in Poland—an attempt to rewrite history—and we should not accept that. Yes, it is true that the Poles did not run those camps—that is a fact—unlike in some neighbouring countries; but we can also look at the language. I keep reading and hearing about the 3 million Jews in Poland—the 3 million Poles; the 3 million of our citizens who were Jewish, who were murdered and lost everything. It is not a surprise that there is not much of an eyewitness record there compared with anywhere else, because few survived. It is harder for the dead to be eyewitnesses.

I will end on this. When I look at what is going on now, I take the Albert Camus view of the world—to see the world through the eye of football. In Poland at the moment, if someone goes to see a football match in Łódź—once a massive Jewish community; now no Jews live in Łódź—what is the insult used in the Łódź derby? “Jew”. From one Łódź team to the other Łódź team, for both sets of fans their term of insult is “Jew”. And what happens in Kraków when Cracovia play Wisła? Do the tourists there go on the nice, sanitised route to Auschwitz-Birkenau? My advice to anyone going there is to go on the suburban route. If they do, I will tell them what they will see on every station: Wisła Kraków graffiti saying “Jews Out”.

[Stephen Pound]

Albert Camus was obviously a great goalkeeper, and I understand my hon. Friend’s analogy. However, I am sure that he has seen Spurs play at home as many times as I have, so he will know the insult that is used against Tottenham Hotspur players. Does he agree that that sort of language—that sort of foul anti-Semitism—should be a matter for criminal law and prosecution? It should not be perceived as indicative of a nation or even a group of football supporters.

[John Mann]

Of course it should be a matter for criminal law—it is in many countries—but my point is not that Poland is any worse than any other country, but that anti-Semitism remains and this law plays to that sentiment. That is the danger of the law.

I will end with a recent quotation from a radio reporter in Poland, Marcin Wolski of TVP2. What did he describe? He said, “Let’s rename the death camps. They’re not ‘Polish death camps’, they’re ‘Jewish death camps’.” He said that on Polish radio recently—because the Sonderkommando ran the death camps, we should therefore rename them “Jewish death camps”. Bring in this kind of law and that kind of racism and anti-Semitism is unleashed. But this is not something that started in Poland; it started elsewhere in eastern Europe. People have been too silent about it—about trying to use the law to rewrite history. The law is not the way to rewrite history.