The original measure, which included restrictions on speech about the country’s role under Nazi occupation, had angered the U.S.
by Leonid Bershidsky
Poland’s nationalist government is learning on the fly how to sidle up to U.S. President Donald Trump while trying to minimize friction with the European Union.

On Wednesday, the Parliament, dominated by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, amended a law passed in February that called for up to three years’ imprisonment for anyone who would “ascribe to the Polish people or the Polish state the responsibility or joint responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” The amended version knocks down the penalty for speaking or writing of “Polish death camps” to a fine, and even that likely wouldn’t be applied.

The statute of the Institute of National Remembrance didn’t just alarm Polish Jews, whose history include episodes of both Polish chivalry and Polish brutality during World War II. It caused a public spat with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Polish government that “One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied.” The U.S. Jewish community was up in arms, too.

Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, hadn’t expected the backlash. In February, he told me it was an unfortunate coincidence that the original law was passed on the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But the PiS didn’t immediately withdraw the threat of imprisonment, arguing that it would be an effective deterrent to mentions of “Polish death camps” that have long irritated the government. The law, however, wasn’t immediately enforced: President Andrzej Duda referred it to the constitutional court.