Polish officials on Thursday criticized a claim made by U.S. congressman Rohit "Ro" Khanna this week asserting that a new Polish law glorifies Nazi collaborators and denies the Holocaust.
Khanna, a Democrat from California, is one of two congressmen leading a bipartisan effort urging the U.S. State Department to pressure Poland and Ukraine to combat state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
"Our government should be concerned with the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and Poland," Khanna wrote Wednesday. "Both countries recently passed laws glorifying Nazi collaborators and denying the Holocaust."
Khanna was referring to the recently passed Polish law that makes it a crime to blame Poland for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The law has sparked criticism in the United States, and even more so in Israel, where some fear it aims to quash any debate about Polish anti-Semitic violence during the German occupation in World War II. However, even critics have not tried to argue that the law glorifies Nazism.
On Thursday, Andrzej Pawluszek, an adviser to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, said Khanna's words were "irresponsible and shocking."
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Bartosz Cichocki retorted Wednesday on Twitter: "Sir, I would appreciate if you indicated a single law passed in my homeland Poland (recently or not), which glorifies Nazi collaborators and/or denies the Holocaust."
In a separate post, he added, "Equally, I would love to learn what exactly your government did to combat [the] Holocaust after being requested to do so by the Polish government-in-exile."
During Germany's occupation of Poland, the Polish government-in-exile struggled to warn the world of the mass killing of Jews – a message that was largely ignored.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum also weighed in, saying, "There is no law in Poland that would glorify collaborators of the German Nazis or that would deny the Holocaust."
Attempts by phone and email to obtain a comment from Khanna received no response.
