One needs to constantly remind, in Poland, that the German genocidal plan targeted the Jews, and the Jews only, that the extermination camps were for Jews, not for Poles. And that the Polish nation thrives, while the nation of Polish Jews, with its language and tradition, ceased to exist. That ’s all.

I soon learned that my statement was entirely unacceptable: an organisation called the Institute to Combat Anti-­Polonism (funded, generously, by the Polish Ministry of Justice) denounced me to the Prosecutor’s Office for slandering the good name of the Polish nation. One could hardly ask for a more egregious example of Holocaust envy.

Incidentally, the Institute to Combat Anti-­Polonism is a child of the June 2018 declaration signed jointly by Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Back then, both politicians agreed to place antisemitism and anti-Polonism on equal footing. While antisemitism is an ancient ideology of hate, more recently responsible for 6 million Jewish deaths, anti-­Polonism is a strange concept which nowadays exists mostly in the imaginations of Polish nationalists. According to the proponents of this idea, there is a worldwide conspiracy directed against the Polish nation. It is a preposterous notion, and the fact that Israel’s PM chose to sign off on such a declaration is just more proof of the desperation of Israeli authorities whitewash

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