I was shocked when I heard Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki's defense of his country's Holocaust law. I was stunned when he said Jews also perpetrated the Holocaust, much the same way I felt on the day a bomb hit our house in the small Polish city of Bilgoraj on Sep. 28, 1939.
I am still shaking as I write these words. Comparing the Jewish victims to criminals? It is important to understand: Even if someone collaborated, they did not do so of their own free will but with the aim of saving their own lives and trying to help save other Jewish lives.
The Polish prime minister should learn about my family's story. My grandfather, Joseph Rappaport, was forced to join the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to oversee the ghetto inhabitants. As a member of the Judenrat, he was required to send people to a concentration camp. He refused to cooperate, and as punishment, he was murdered in the center of town, as an example of what would happen to the Jews who refuse to cooperate with the murderers of women and babies.
I would like to ask the Polish prime minister: How can you call a Jew that went through the Holocaust, regardless of whether they collaborated with the Nazis or not, a criminal? It is unforgivable. The Germans burned my other grandfather, Shmariahu Wircer, in the synagogue when he ran inside to save the Torah scrolls. Outside, as the fire burned, Germans and Poles stood together and watched – and I need to hear that I am the grandchild of criminals?
As someone who for 40 years has tried to forge ties between Israel and Poland and promote Polish-Jewish culture, I think the Polish prime minister should be ashamed. For the sake of the Polish people, it would be better to erase these words. Just as they fight against the use of the term "Polish death camps," so too will we fight for the memory of the Holocaust and we will remind people of what was done to the Jews of Poland, both by Germans and hundreds of thousands of Poles.
I call on the authorities in Poland not to approve this law, in the name of the generation that managed to survive the Holocaust. These are our last years, and I hope we live to see this corrected.
