His colleague Mariusz Bechta – who in 2016 was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit “for the promotion of knowledge about Polish history” – has published many books by fascist authors. Both have doctoral titles in history. It raised few eyebrows, then, when in 2016 Jarosław Szarek, the head of the IPN, declared that Germans, not Poles, were responsible for the 1941 mass murder of the Jews in Jedwabne. A brief explanation: Jedwabne was a town in north-east Poland where the local citizens rounded up all their Jewish neighbours, beat them, tortured them and finally herded them into a large barn and burned them alive. The ideological evolution of the IPN reached its logical conclusion with the appointment in 2021 of Tomasz Greniuch (another PhD in history) to the position of director of the IPN’s Wrocław office. Greniuch claims not to be a neo-Nazi but has been photographed giving the Nazi salute and belonged to the overtly fascist ONR. He is an open admirer of Léon Degrelle, the Belgian Nazi collaborator about whom Hitler once said, “If I had a son, I would want him to be like Degrelle.” After an international outcry, Greniuch was forced to tender his resignation, but the fact that someone with his background could have been appointed in the first place was a disturbing sign of radicalisation of Polish internal politics.
The IPN is just one of the many state institutions deployed by the Polish authorities to confront people, books and ideas
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the jewish quarterly
