Israeli, Polish, German leaders overcome tension to jointly remember Warsaw rebels

WARSAW, Poland — It may be a usual occurrence in Israel, but the sirens that wailed in this city Wednesday were an extraordinary sign of commitment to the commemoration of Jewish Holocaust victims in Poland.

At the Polish capital’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, dozens of Holocaust survivors and dignitaries, including the Israeli, Polish and German presidents, stood to the sounds of the sirens for a minute of silence in memory of the Jews who staged an uprising here 80 years ago.

Authorities, including the Warsaw city education department, handed out to thousands of residents across the metropolitan area yellow pieces of paper, cut in the shape of a daffodil, the official symbol that the city has designated for the uprising.

President Isaac Herzog was in Warsaw Wednesday, the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, for talks with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda and other Polish leaders, as well as a trilateral meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

The meeting is symbolically significant not only due to its commemorative value, but also because it occurs amid diplomatic tensions between the three countries over the historical narrative of World War II, which are sowing divisions between Germany and Poland even as both countries assist Poland’s eastern neighbor Ukraine in its war with Russia.

In the Ghetto Warsaw Uprising, the largest-scale act of armed resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, a few hundred members of two Jewish underground movements launched a series of hostile actions against German troops with makeshift and smuggled arms. The Germans needed several weeks to quell the uprising, in which multiple German soldiers died. The Germans subsequently burned down the ghetto and murdered about 50,000 people who were left in it when the uprising began.

Israel’s relations with Poland deteriorated after Warsaw passed a law 2018 that made it illegal to blame the Polish nation for Nazi crimes. Then-foreign minister Yair Lapid called the law an attempt to whitewash Polish complicity. Attempts at reconciliation included a recent draft agreement between Poland and Israel on the resumption of Israeli school trips to Nazi former death camps, which drew fire for its inclusion of recommended sites that critics say provide a distorted view of the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Polish politicians have been seeking reparations from Germany for crimes against Polish citizens, a demand that Germany so far has not been prepared to meet.

Herzog implicitly referenced the Israeli-Polish dispute in his speech.

“We must remember that the memory of the Holocaust is not postmodern or relative. All peoples involved had absolute evil, in the form of the Nazis and their collaborators, and absolute good, in the form of the victims and the rebels,” he said. “Any attempt to convey this historical heritage to future generations must reflect this undisputed axiom, without embellishment.”

Herzog also thanks Duda for his commitment to Holocaust commemoration and said that he is certain this effort will serve “as the foundation to work out differences and further the strong friendship between our nations.”

Duda, who did not reference the dispute, began his speech with an overview of the Nazi and Soviet aggression in Poland, when German troops and soldiers fighting for the Soviet Union occupied and divided Poland. Unusually, Duda called the Nazis “the Germans” in his speech.

Steinmeier also did so in his speech, saying: “The terrible crimes Germans perpetrated here fill me with shame but also gratitude and humility to be able to participate in this event as first German head of state to do so.”

Steinmeier also spoke about the war in Ukraine in his speech.

“We German have learned our lessons, ” he said. “When we say ‘never again’ we mean never again racism and persecution but also never again occupation and aggression in Europe, which is why we, Poland and other allies are helping Ukraine in the war against Vladimir Putin’s aggression.”

Duda in his speech also said that the rebels “fought for freedom. Not to live freely, unfortunately, but for freedom over one’s own fate.” They are an example, he said, for “soldiers guarding Israel’s borders and for Polish ones guarding Poland’s borders.”

Trilateral meetings of this nature have occurred before on round anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, though not in the presence of a German president but rather with the president of the Bundestag, according to Avi Mehl, an Israeli former diplomat who participated in the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Poland. But it is especially significant in light of the tensions, he said.

“The disagreements are deep and not quite bridged yet, despite repeated attempts at reconciliation,” Mehl told The Times of Israel. But, he added, “the way forward is made of small steps and this is clearly a step in the right direction.”