Polish Education Minister Roman Giertych, an ultra-nationalist who heads a far-right, anti-Semitic political party, said Wednesday, July 12 that his decision to attend a Holocaust memorial was “one of the most difficult decisions” of his life.
Giertych’s highly unusual participation at the memorial for hundreds of Jews killed by their Polish neighbors during World War II came just three days after the Israeli ambassador to Poland publicly announced that he was shunning the minister due to his party’s anti-Semitic ideology.
That visit, to the Polish town of Jedwabne, was widely seen as Giertych’s effort to prove that he was not an anti-Semite.
“It is very difficult for my electorate to understand such a visit,” Giertych told The Jerusalem Post in an interview in his Warsaw office, noting that his “gesture” to the State of Israel — a gesture that, he said, carried a personal political risk — had already been criticized in certain circles.
“It was necessary to finish this discussion about Polish anti-Semitism, which we have to cut off,” he said, explaining his reasons for participating in the ceremony.
“We have to cut off this path, this obsession, and to create a new future,” he added.
In the interview, the populist education minister, whose grandfather was a notorious anti-Semite and whose party’s youth wing has been known to make Nazi salutes and chant Nazi slogans, disassociated himself from his party’s anti-Semitic past and roots.
Giertych, who also serves as deputy prime minister and who was appointed to the education ministry in February as part of the government’s coalition with two fringe parties, suggested that some Poles had a psychological complex that made it difficult for them to empathize with Jewish victims of the Holocaust due to their own suffering during World War II.
“It is difficult to demonstrate sympathy and compassion when you yourself suffered a lot,” he said. “There is a certain psychological difficulty that we face that will have to be overcome.”