photographs held in trust by the Auschwitz Museum. During the three-week-long campaign, the history of the camp and its victims was corrupted in front of audiences numbered in the millions. Nevertheless, the Auschwitz Museum, the self-appointed watchdog and gatekeeper of Auschwitz-related information – so active in the media whenever an obscure novel misrepresents the story of the camp – remained oddly silent.
To understand this silence, we need to go back to 2019, when, shortly before the general elections, the Holocaust once again occupied centre stage in Polish political debates. The nationalists were upset about the 2017 US Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today Act, which required the US Department of State to provide a report to Congress on the progress of the restitution of assets seized during or following World War II. The act had no legal relevance for Poland but Polish right-wing zealots viewed it as an opportunity to consolidate their electorate against a common enemy. The message was simple: the Jews are coming back, they want to claim our houses and take our money. The media joined this chorus of indignation: “We also were the victims”, “The Poles suffered as much as the Jews” ran the headlines. The exchanges became more and more heated, and the atmosphere filled with antisemitic overtones.
In the middle of the awful campaign of hate, I made a public comment on social media, which, I thought, restated the obvious:
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the jewish quarterly
