Jack Simony
From Poland, where the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation is based, I’m often asked a blunt question by Jewish communities abroad: What is Poland today, and how should Jews relate to it? The confusion is real.
Poland is the geographic heart of the Holocaust, the burial ground of millions of our tortured and murdered ancestors. It is also a country that has expanded Holocaust education, restored Jewish heritage sites and passed laws against antisemitism, in addition to hosting official Jewish commemorations in its parliament. How can all of that be true at once?
Poland’s struggle with Jewish memory is not simply about denial. It is about a nation still carrying the psychological wreckage of Nazi terror and living with the fact that the Holocaust unfolded largely on its soil.
The Eastern European nation bordering Germany endured one of the most savage occupations in modern European history. It was invaded, and its elites hunted, its culture attacked and its population terrorized. As many as 3 million non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed during World War II, alongside about 3 million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
When the war ended, Poland barely resembled itself. Borders shifted west, populations were uprooted, and entire regions were emptied and repopulated.
That shared geography of suffering creates a lasting tension. Many Poles recoil at accusations of complicity. They fear Jewish memory eclipses Polish suffering. They bristle when antisemitism is raised. Beneath that defensiveness is an anxiety rarely spoken aloud: that Poland’s pain is being morally judged.
This is not a rejection of Jewish memory. It is fear of indictment. And fear, when unresolved, hardens into ambivalence.
Here is the hard truth that often gets flattened in public debate. Warsaw did not collaborate with Nazi Germany as a state, unlike Vichy France or other occupied regimes. Under German occupation, helping Jews in Poland was punishable by death — a penalty applied not just to individuals but often to their families as well. Poland also has more people recognized as Righteous Among the Nations than any other country, non-Jews who risked and often lost their lives to save Jews.
Still, historical honesty demands more. There were individual Poles who betrayed Jews, who informed on neighbors, who committed antisemitic violence outside direct German orders. These acts were not state policy. They were not universal. But they were real.
The heroism of rescuers does not erase betrayal. Betrayal does not negate mass Polish victimhood. Confusing individual crime with collective guilt distorts history. Refusing to acknowledge individual wrongdoing destroys trust.
Many Jews come to Poland to stand where their families were isolated, humiliated, brutalized and murdered. Many Poles want those visitors to understand that Poland was not just a backdrop for Jewish death, but a nation crushed in its own right. Both claims are true. The conflict begins when memory becomes competitive instead of cumulative.
There is also a deeper past that matters. Nearly 1,000 years ago, when Jews were persecuted across much of Europe, Poland became a place of refuge. Through royal protections like the Statute of Kalisz, Jews were invited to live, worship, trade and build communities. Jewish civilization — its scholarship, traditions and communal life — cannot be understood without Poland. That history does not cancel the catastrophe that followed.
But it demands accuracy, not amnesia.
Modern-day Poland has also produced moral leadership worth remembering. Shaped by Nazi occupation and the annihilation of Polish Jewry, Pope John Paul II transformed Catholic-Jewish relations. He gave force to Nostra Aetate, visited a synagogue, called Jews Christianity’s elder brothers, centered the Holocaust in Catholic moral teaching and established diplomatic relations with Israel. His example proves that reckoning with history can lead to repair, not paralysis.
Poland’s image in the Jewish world is often shaped more by spectacle than substance. Extremists grab headlines. Education reforms and restoration projects do not. Context is not minimization. It is accuracy.
A serious Jewish-Polish relationship does not require unanimity on history or silence about wrongdoing. It requires something harder. Jews must engage Poland as it is now — not only as the landscape of Jewish death, but as a society still wrestling with its past. At the same time, Poles must understand that Jewish memory is not an accusation. It is a responsibility.
Trust will not be built through blanket absolution or constant accusation. It will come through sustained engagement, intellectual precision and humility, and by accepting that memory, honestly held, is not a zero-sum inheritance.
Poland’s reckoning with Jewish memory is unfinished. So is the Jewish world’s understanding of Poland. If Jewish memory is to be protected and antisemitism confronted seriously, then understanding Poland in all its complexity is not optional.
It is part of the work.
Jack Simony is the director general of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to harnessing the lessons learned from the Holocaust to combat hatred and bigotry through educational programs, and by providing direct humanitarian aid to victims of mass atrocities.
