A day after stirring controversy for saying there were "Jewish perpetrators" during World War II, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Sunday he was looking toward dialogue with Israel over the Holocaust in order to prevent such "exceptionally terrifying" crimes from happening again.
"Dialogue about this most difficult history is necessary, as a warning. We will conduct such dialogue with Israel," Morawiecki wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
Morawiecki tweeted his thoughts after a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu's office said he told Morawiecki that "the remarks that he made were unacceptable and that there was no basis for comparing the actions of Poles during the Holocaust to those of Jews." The statement further said that "Netanyahu pointed out that the goal of the Holocaust was to destroy the Jewish people and that all Jews were under sentence of death. He told his Polish counterpart that the distortion regarding Poland could not be corrected by means of another distortion."
The two prime ministers agreed to work together to soothe the intense feelings in both their countries. The remark, given Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, reignited a diplomatic dispute over Poland's new law prohibiting some statements accusing the Polish people as a whole or Polish authorities of carrying out Nazi atrocities. The law reflects the current Polish government's approach to World War II history, which focuses on Poland's suffering and heroism.
Morawiecki made the criticized comment as he was responding to an Israeli journalist's question about the new Polish law. The journalist said his parents' families were reported to the Nazis by Polish neighbors and asked if he would be charged if he had related the story in Poland.
"Of course it's not going to be punishable, not going to be seen as criminal, to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators," Morawiecki said in response.
The spokeswoman for Poland's conservative ruling party, Beata Mazurek, insisted that Morawiecki "told the truth that is difficult for the Israeli side to accept."
"There is no need to apologize for telling the truth," Mazurek said.
In his tweets Sunday, Morawiecki sought to elaborate on what he was trying to say. "The Holocaust, the genocide of Jews committed by Nazi Germans was an extremely terrifying crime. In these terrible times, there were individuals among all nations, who were ready to make gestures of the greatest mercy," the Polish prime minister said. "And unfortunately, there were also individuals, who by collaborating with Nazi Germans, showed the darkest side of human nature," he wrote.
Earlier in the day, Morawiecki spokeswoman Joanna Kopcinska said the prime minister's response to the journalist's question was "by no means intended to deny the Holocaust."
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder issued a statement demanding an "immediate retraction and apology" from Poland. Lauder said that putting Jews in the same category as the other nationalities was "nothing short of an attempt to falsify history that rings of the very worst forms of anti-Semitism and Holocaust obfuscation."
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin also lashed out at the Polish prime minister on Sunday, saying: "To say that Jews collaborated with the Nazis is a new low ; we must teach the world and a few of its leaders, now more than ever, about this dark chapter in history and the atrocities that were carried out by the Nazis and their helpers."
