WSJ: Dershowitz: Poland Seeks to Censor History

True, the Germans built Auschwitz and other death camps on
Polish soil. But the Germans could not have murdered the Polish Jews,
and millions of other Europeans imported to death camps in Poland,
without the active assistance of many Poles in identifying and rounding
up victims. This complicity was incited by generations of anti-Semitic
church sermons. Poles also murdered Jews during and after the German
occupation—including in the Jedwabne pogrom in July 1941 and in Kielce
in July 1946.

On the positive side, there were Polish Catholics,
including priests and nuns, who risked their lives protecting Jews.
There were many other righteous Polish individuals as well. Jan Karski
risked his life by dressing as a death-camp guard so he could document
the horrors, and the Ulma family was murdered for harboring Jews.

Poland’s
role in the Holocaust is a mixed picture of complicity, heroism,
complacency and willful blindness. It is up to historians to sort out
the specifics and moralists to apportion blame. But it is not the role
of law to stifle debate and to threaten those who question the current
self-serving Polish government narrative.

Nor does history need
laws to confirm that the Holocaust occurred. Yet several European
governments have made Holocaust denial a crime. Denying the Armenian
genocide is a crime in France; acknowledging it is a crime in Turkey.
Israel’s Knesset is responding the Polish effort by weighing its own
legislation that would make it a crime to deny or minimize the role of
collaborators in the Holocaust. Both the proposed Polish and Israeli
laws would have extraterritorial reach, so virtually any discussion or
debate about this issue would risk prosecution and imprisonment in one
of those countries. Such is the consequence of governmental efforts—no
matter how well-intentioned—to criminalize debates about history.

It
is understandable why people who believe there is only one side to a
debate would seek to censor what they regard as malicious lies about
deeply emotional issues such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.
It is also understandable that some American students and faculty,
particularly on the hard left, seek to stifle “hate speech,”
“micro-aggressions” and comments or ideas that make them feel “unsafe.”

But
censorship comes around like a boomerang. To some Palestinians on
campuses, Zionist speech creates an unsafe space, while to some Jewish
students, anti-Israel speech offends and frightens. To some women,
antiabortion advocacy is demeaning, while to some Christians,
pro-abortion advocacy is offensive. It is not the role of governments or
universities to take sides in these conflicts. It is very much their
role to encourage civil discourse on these and other controversial
issues that divide people emotionally and intellectually. It is also the
role of these institutions to promote tolerance of conflicting views
and to tell citizens and students that, in a democracy, there are no
safe spaces from ideas.

So let the competing narratives
regarding the role of Poland, the Polish Catholic Church and individual
Poles continue to be debated without the heavy hand of governmental
censorship and criminal punishment. Trust the open marketplace of ideas,
rather than the self-serving biases of bureaucrats, to arrive at the
complex truth about this terrible period in Polish and Jewish history.

is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of
“Trumped Up! How Criminalizing Politics Is Dangerous to Democracy”
(CreateSpace, 2017).