Jews moved to the ghetto during World War II to get away of non-Jews, said a former senator and father of the Polish prime minister in an interview published Tuesday by the online magazine Kultura Liberalna.
The statement was made by the father of the current Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who took office in December 2017.
“Do you know who chased the Jews away to the Warsaw Ghetto?” Kornel Morawiecki asked while talking to the magazine reporter last Tuesday.
“The Germans, you think? No. The Jews themselves went because they were told that there would be an enclave, that they would not have to deal with those nasty Poles.”
This remarks come amid a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland over the Warsaw Holocaust bill, a law that criminalizes blaming Poles for participating of Nazi crimes. The bill caused disgust and sparked criticism from Israeli authorities and Jewish groups throughout the world.
The former politician went further and tackled another burning issue: the alleged complicity of the Jews in the genocide led by the Nazis against the Jewish population.
The newly-appointed PM Morawiecki said, responding to an Israeli journalist that nobody needed to fear being punished in Poland for claiming there had been “Polish perpetrators” – just as there were “Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian – not only German perpetrators.”
The deputy foreign minister, Bartosz Cichocki, said Thursday that the comment does not reflect the position of the Polish government.