Poland Honours Warsaw Jews' Uprising Amid Tension Over Holocaust Law

Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday honoured the young Jews who launched the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis 75 years ago, but also used the occasion to reject claims that Poles had a hand in the Holocaust.

Warsaw, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Apr, 2018 ) :Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday honoured the young Jews who launched the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis 75 years ago, but also used the occasion to reject claims that Poles had a hand in the Holocaust.

"I am strongly convinced that both Poles and also Polish Jews deeply care about having a single historical truth," Duda said at a remembrance ceremony at the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw. Hundreds of Jewish fighters launched their attack on April 19, 1943, after the Nazis began deporting the surviving residents of the Jewish district they had set up after invading Poland.

The insurgents preferred to die fighting instead of in a gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp where the Nazis had already sent more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews. "They stood up proudly, arms in their hands, to demonstrate to the Germans that Jews would not be defeated so easily and trampled upon," Duda said.

The head of state recalled that the fighters had help from non-Jewish Poles who gave them weapons and shot at the Germans outside the ghetto walls.

"There were Poles who helped Jews, treating them like brothers, like fellow citizens," Duda said.

"And that is why I am sure that whenever anyone talks about the responsibility or co-responsibility of the Polish state for the Holocaust, that person hurts the feelings of Poles but also the feelings of Polish Jews," Duda added.

"Not only is it slander but it also blurs the responsibility of the true executioners, the German Nazis." Duda's statement appeared to be a reference to the new Holocaust law which came into effect last month.

The legislation, which penalises statements attributing Nazi German crimes to the Polish state with fines or a jail term of up to three years, was meant to protect the country from false accusations of complicity.

But the law has drawn strong criticism from Israel and Jewish organisations, which accused Warsaw of denying the participation of individual Poles in the genocide of Jews. Israel also expressed concern that the law could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony.