Poland’s efforts to reframe history reflect a trend proliferating in other European countries to obfuscate the history of the Holocaust. In France, the far right has made efforts to whitewash the record of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis. In Hungary and Croatia, local complicity and collaboration during the war is downplayed, shifting the blame for the Jewish catastrophe entirely onto the German occupiers. What makes the Polish example so distinctive is the apparent scale of state official involvement in redirecting the narrative.

In all these cases, pushing blame for the destruction of Jewish communities entirely onto Nazi occupiers obfuscates the larger context of Holocaust horror and the very real problems of collaboration, bystanderism and local antisemitism that helped run the machine of the Holocaust.

Indeed, in Poland some of the commemorative markers have even been erected in places such as the town of Sadowne, where Mr. Starkopf described listening to the sound of Jews “being dragged through the snow to barns and stables” after his conversation with his neighbors. Thus the marker serves to deflect attention from atrocities committed by locals and to reframe their role in history. This commemorative drive allows the nationalists to present themselves as primarily defenders of the idea of historical innocence of the nation.