An event that unites world leaders in shared horror at the Holocaust turned into diplomatic posturing this week as a feud between Russia and Poland flared on the anniversary of when prisoners were freed from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“They split up the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz,” Izabella Tabarovsky, a Russia expert at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “Usually, the liberation of Auschwitz — it’s a unifying event, basically. Everybody gets together in Auschwitz, and they are there.”
Instead, Russian President Vladimir Putin spent Friday at the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, Israel, alongside many Western leaders, and the Polish government commemorated the event on Monday. The Russian leader did not attend the ceremony in Poland, while Moscow claimed Putin was not invited.
The liberation day ceremonies provided clues about Putin’s opportunity to make diplomatic inroads in Western Europe, even as he burnishes the history of the Soviet Union at Poland’s expense.
“Many Poles stood by and even assisted in the murder of Jews,” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said Monday in Krakow, Poland, at a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Half a continent away, in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron extended an olive branch to Moscow by paying special tribute to the Soviet forces that liberated the Nazi camp.
“On Jan. 27, 1945, the brave soldiers of the Red Army set foot behind the barbed wire of the concentration camp,” Macron said in remarks that the Russian state-run media publicized. “They did not know yet at that moment that they are walking over the ashes of a mass grave where over a million people had perished.”
The incidents perpetuate a dispute that has unfolded over the last two years. The friction is driven in part by Poland’s push to criminalize any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust and in part by Putin’s efforts to portray the leaders of former Soviet vassal states as neo-Nazis or fascists.
“It’s also interesting that the French president chose to go to Jerusalem rather than to [Poland], Jakub Wisniewski, a former Polish diplomat at GLOBSEC, a foreign policy think tank headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia, told the Washington Examiner.
Macron’s choice reflects his desire to improve diplomatic relations with Russia, the former envoy said. “It shows how [much] weaker the Polish alliances are these days.”
Putin has been highlighting World War II-era Polish anti-Semitism while denying the Soviet Union’s complicity with Nazi Germany when it signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Europe into spheres of influence for Moscow and Berlin.
“They’ve been whitewashing certain aspects of Soviet history for a long time,” said Tabarovsky. “There is this idea that children should not be taught bad history [because] it’s depressing.”
“For Putin, now, it’s very convenient to capitalize it, to use it for his own advantage,” said Wisniewski. “He is kind of presenting himself as a kind of leader, president, and hero of a nation which saved Europe and the world from Nazis.”
Auschwitz survivors and their descendants commemorated the day in solemn events and testimonies delivered over the past week around the world.
