Poland’s six years of Nazi defiance

U.S. Ambassador to Poland Tom Rose said something true, necessary and long overdue: Poland did not perpetrate the Holocaust. Nazi Germany did.

And Poland—unlike France, Norway, Hungary and so many others—never collaborated at the national or governmental level with Hitler’s regime. There was no Polish Vichy. No Polish Quisling. No initial alliance with the Reich, like Russia. Poland fought the Nazis from the first day of the war until the last.

History, however, is complicated, and honesty requires we acknowledge the full picture. Not to smear Poland, not to invent a “Polish Holocaust”—a grotesque and historically illiterate phrase—but to understand the reality of what happened on Polish soil under six years of unimaginable German terror.

What Rose got absolutely right is that the state