Poland cannot silence Noa Kirel, or any Israelis, about the Holocaust - analysis

When Israeli pop star Noa Kirel came in third place in the Eurovision Song Contest, beyond all the usual comments about being proud and excited, she had one remark that stood out.

“To receive 12 points” - the highest possible score - “from Poland after almost the entire Kirel family was murdered there in the Holocaust is a great achievement,” Kirel told ynet.

This was, arguably, a pretty weird thing to say. It’s true that analyzing the political implications of Eurovision scoring is a longstanding custom in Israel and across Europe, and one can point to the song “Hai” (Alive) by Ofra Haza at the Eurovision in Munich as a statement about the massacre at the Olympics in that city years before. But this seemed to an attempt at shoehorning history into a place where it didn’t belong. Why would Poles be thinking about the Holocaust when scoring a song about unicorns performed in Liverpool?

Poland slams Noa Kirel for her comment

Rather than shrug this off as an odd statement by a pop star, Poland did what it does anytime someone dares mentioned that a large part of the Holocaust took place in their country, and pitched a fit. Not only was Kirel’s statement labeled a “Eurovision scandal” in news headlines, but the government weighed in.

Poland’s Undersecretary of State Pawel Jablonski tweeted about the issue, saying that “the fact that many people in Israel consider Poland to be a co-perpetrator of German crimes - not their victim - is often the result not so much of bad will as lack of knowledge and incomplete education…One of them was certainly the form of organized trips of Israeli youth to Poland.”

Never mind that Kirel did not say Poland was a co-perpetrator of German crimes. All she said was “almost the entire Kirel family was murdered there in the Holocaust,” which is a fact. Her relatives were murdered in Auschwitz, which is in Poland. Even the narrative that Poland prefers to emphasize, of their own victimhood, acknowledges the same thing that Kirel does: The Nazis murdered millions of people in Poland.

Jablonski went on to mention the agreement between Israel and Poland that the Education Ministry’s organized trips will include a stop at sites that explain the Polish side of the story, and to invite Kirel to Poland. 

That agreement, reached between this new government and Warsaw this year, is something that Foreign Minister Eli Cohen is proud of, and he listed it as one of his achievements when interviewed by The Jerusalem Post last week. It allowed for high school seniors to visit Poland once again to cap off their lessons about the Holocaust by seeing Auschwitz. However, it also required the groups to visit a site out of a list provided by the Polish government to tell the story of non-Jews who suffered under the Nazis.

Notably, the agreement does not mean that pop stars who didn’t even really attend high school will not make strange - though factual - comments about Poland and the Holocaust. That will likely continue even after scores of Israeli teenagers visit Poland-approved sites, since Israeli governments don’t even manage to control what its own ministers say in the media, let alone anyone else.

But, as Jablonski says in his tweets, the agreement does give Poland a foothold to tell its own story to Israelis, who they feel unfairly blame them. That is, at least in part, Israel capitulating to Warsaw’s demands in order to bring back the trips for high schoolers, which are also a money-maker for Poland.

Why, then, is Poland still acting like it wants a fight with Israel?

To Jablonski’s credit his tweet about Kirel was worded diplomatically, saying that Israelis do not have “bad will,” and not like he is trying to pick a fight. 

At the same time, there is a sinister message behind his smooth words that we are simply ignorant and uneducated. That message is that Jews have to privilege the Polish narrative over the genocide of the Jewish people. We see that in the list of sites that Poland wants Israelis to visit. Among their examples of people who suffered under the Nazis are people like Józef Kuras who commanded partisans against the Nazis, but also murdered Holocaust survivors by the truckload in an endeavor to cleanse Poland of Jews and communists.

Poland has long been obsessed with being falsely portrayed as the perpetrator of the Holocaust, going back to when US president Barack Obama referred to Auschwitz as a “Polish death camp.” One can understand Poles not liking the phrase “Polish death camps,” since the camps, while located in Poland, were put there by Germans. They are Nazi death camps in Poland, and that should not be in dispute.

But Polish governments of recent years have taken their complaint several steps forward, to try to silence anyone, domestically and internationally, who dares mention the fact that victimhood is not the only thing that happened.

About 90% of Poland’s pre-war 3.3 million Jewish population, the largest in Europe at the time, was murdered by the Nazis, and there is broad agreement among historians that antisemitism by ordinary Poles was a contributing factor. The Polish police collaborated with the Nazis, and an estimated 200,000 Jews were turned in to the Nazis by Poles. In the Jedwabne pogrom in 1941, during the Holocaust, Poles locked Jews in a barn and burned it down, killing hundreds or as many as 1,600 by some estimates. There are many documented cases of survivors going back to their homes in Poland only to be attacked or killed; in 1946, a year after World War II ended, Poles spread a blood libel and murdered 42 Jews in Kielce. 

And that comes after centuries of pogroms and other attacks on Jews, though, it must be noted, there were also periods in which Jews thrived in Poland.

Instead of confronting this complexity, that while millions of non-Jewish Poles were killed in World War II and over 7,000 Poles are recognized as saving Jews there were still Polish collaborators with the Nazis and Poles who inflicted violence upon Jews in their midst, the Polish government wants to censor anyone who talks about it. Their bullying campaign includes pop singers, historians - like Jan Grabowski, who faces legal battles in Poland - and journalists.

The suppression and elision of pertinent historic details about the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial, even if Jablonski is not comfortable with the assertion. In fact, he responded to that assertion, made by this reporter on Twitter, by taking his Holocaust distortion even further, claiming that talking about the role of Poles in the Holocaust is “outrageous theories that Jews are somehow self-responsible for the Holocaust - because some Jewish individuals also collaborated.” No, the argument is not that Poles killed themselves; the argument is that large numbers of them took part in killing the Jews in their midst.

No serious person in Poland denies neither the Holocaust, nor other Nazi German crimes, also Soviet Russian crimes during WWII. 6 million of our citizens were killed, millions of others—including my grandfather—forced to work as German slaves. Hundreds of cities and villages… https://t.co/JAGzcFoCVr

— Paweł Jabłoński (@paweljablonski_) May 21, 2023

Never go full Mahmoud Abbas if you don’t want to be accused of Holocaust denial.

What Warsaw doesn’t seem to realize is that, while the government may want to get diplomatic relations on track, and there is nothing wrong with that in theory, Cohen did not sign a censorship agreement.

Jablonski tweeted that he is optimistic that relations with Israel and Poland and Jews and Poland will grow stronger. That can only be the case if he does not seek to silence Israelis and Jews. Israelis are not ignorant or uneducated about the Holocaust and they’re not going to stop talking about what happened to our relatives in Poland, whether by the hand of the Nazis, which is statistically more likely to be the case, or by Poles, before, during or after Nazi occupation.