Swastikas and profanities were daubed on the entrance to the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv on Sunday, a day after Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Jews, as well as Poles and others, were among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Poland sparked international criticism over its stance on the facts of the Holocaust when it passed a law recently imposing jail terms for anyone suggesting the country was complicit in the deaths of millions of Jews during the war.
At the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Morawiecki was asked by an Israeli reporter whether he, the reporter, could be penalized if he was in Poland and repeated the story his mother, a Holocaust survivor, had told him, that some Poles had collaborated with the Gestapo.
Morawiecki replied by equating "Jewish perpetrators" with Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and German perpetrators, drawing immediate criticism from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called his words "outrageous."
Poland's government said Morawiecki's comments were not intended to deny the Holocaust or to claim that Jewish victims bore responsibility for the "Nazi German-perpetrated genocide."
"Attempts to equate the crimes of Nazi German perpetrators with the actions of their victims – Jewish, Polish, Romani, among others – who struggled for survival should be met with resolute, outright condemnation," the Polish government's statement said.
On Sunday, swastikas and anti-Polish profanities were found drawn on a gate and bulletin board at the Polish Embassy. Police released photographs of the markings and opened an investigation. However, embassy officials declined to cooperate with police and would not allow them into the embassy building or to have access to security camera footage.
Netanyahu spoke with Morawiecki by telephone on Sunday and rejected any comparison between Polish and Jewish actions during the Holocaust, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office.
"The aim of the Holocaust was to destroy the Jewish people and every Jew, everywhere, was facing a death sentence," the statement quoted Netanyahu as saying.
Netanyahu and Morawiecki agreed to continue to pursue a dialogue on the new law, and to have teams from both sides meet soon, the statement said.
Three million of out the 3.3 million Jews who lived in pre-war Poland – home to Europe's biggest Jewish community – were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Jews from across Europe were sent to be killed in death camps built and operated by Germans in occupied Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
Thousands of Poles risked their lives to protect Jewish neighbors during the war. But research published since the fall of communism in 1989 showed that thousands also killed Jews or denounced those who hid them to the Nazi occupiers, challenging the national narrative that Poland was solely a victim.
According to figures from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis also killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians.
