, Columnist
Why Polish Jews Are Growing Uneasy
The country's ruling Law & Justice Party is finding out that national revival is a dangerous game.
Mixed messages.
Photographer: Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty ImagesA month ago Poland passed the revised statute of its state-run Institute of National Remembrance, making it illegal to apportion any blame for Nazi crimes to Poland. Yet Mateusz Szpytma, the INR's deputy president, still can't explain to me what exactly one needs to say to end up in prison for three years.
"Ask the prosecutor," is all Szpytma will say. But doesn't the law empower the institute to make official complaints in such cases? Szpytma, on the defensive and looking sorry he agreed to talk to a journalist, shakes his head: The IPN, he insists, won't have anything to do with punishing people for what they say about Polish history. It exists to do research, not to create an official version of that history.