Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Polish Government Minister Walks Back ‘Polocaust’ Museum Plan

(JTA) — A “Polocaust” museum dedicated to non-Jewish Polish victims of the Nazis will not be built, a Polish government minister who supported the idea said.

Deputy Culture Minister Jaroslaw Sellin on Monday walked back his support of the idea, floated last week by writer and scholar Marek Kochan in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, saying it would antagonize Jews, Reuters reported.

The Nazis murdered nearly 2 million Poles during World War II and about 3 million Polish Jews.

“Using the concept of ‘Polokaust’ in a way I understand it would hurt Jewish sensitivity and unnecessarily provoke more tension between our nations. The Polokaust museum will not be built,” Sellin said in an interview with Rzeczpospolita published Monday.

When the idea was published last week it met with criticism from many circles.

The suggestion comes on the heels of Poland’s recently passed Holocaust law criminalizing claims that the Polish nation or state is responsible for Nazi crimes. The new law has triggered protests from researchers, historians and journalists, as well as Holocaust survivors, Israeli leaders and Jews around the world.

The term Polokaust has been used on some Polish Twitter accounts since at least 2012. Poland already runs a Museum of World War II.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.