Let Us Fight for the Dignity of Poland’s Genocide Victims

Text based on a speech delivered during the commemorations of the 85th anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre, July 10, 2026.

The meeting in Jedwabne, and the struggle for truth being waged here, mean more than participants in the anniversary commemorations may realize. The fight for truth will weigh on the memory of generations yet to come. It is worth lifting our eyes from the anniversary itself and asking the broader question: what does Jedwabne mean, what is the fight for truth, and what does truth mean in the life of nations.

A Crime Without a Name

Jedwabne is a fragment of a crime so immense that to this day we are unable to name it. We have been stripped of memory to such an extent that for the crime committed against the Polish nation from 1939 until at least 1945, we have not adopted even a single, common name. And yet it was a crime whose purpose was open and known to all. Its goal was to exterminate the Polish nation at every level of existence: physical, biological, and in memory and culture. To erase it from the map of the world. Jedwabne must be spoken of precisely from this perspective.

The perpetrators murdered Polish citizens. They were never buried; to this day they lie in death pits. They died because they were citizens of an invaded state. In the Second Polish Republic they voted in Polish elections, appeared before Polish courts, held Polish public offices, paid taxes in Poland, sent their children to Polish schools, spoke Polish. They died as Poles. And today there are attempts to strip them of their Polishness, to erect a wall between them and the rest of the nation. We will not allow them to be stripped of their dignity. It is this dignity that we are fighting for today, in this place.

The Right to Truth

Almost no one speaks of these victims today. They have been politicized; bodies thrown carelessly into death pits have become political ammunition. And yet these were people with names and surnames, often with documents issued to Polish citizens by the Polish government. It is up to us to stand up for them.

Among the rights of genocide victims, one of the foremost is the right to truth. Every victim has the right — even posthumously — for those who survived to know the truth about the crime; to be able to call the murdered by name; for their names to be remembered. And for the perpetrators to be known. Proclaiming the truth about the identity of the executioners is itself a form of commemorating the victims. Whoever lies about the perpetrators strips the victims of their dignity: he plays politics on the corpses lying in the death pits and blocks the path to truth.

The Pole Who Named Genocide

Why do I speak of genocide? Because we, Poles, have a special claim to demand dignity for its victims. Not only because this great crime, committed by the hands of Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians, struck the Polish nation and Polish citizens — Catholics and Jews alike — over the course of several tragic years of war. But also because it was a Pole who created the very concept of genocide. A Polish lawyer named genocide genocide. Few people in Poland know this today; this history, too, has been taken from us.

Rafał Lemkin, a prosecutor at the Regional Court in Warsaw and later a Warsaw attorney, a Polish Jew, was already warning in the 1930s that the murder of people somewhere in the world must not be forgotten. He recalled the fate of the Armenians, slaughtered barely twenty years earlier in Turkey, for whom no one had spoken up. The world stayed silent. Lemkin demanded legal instruments that would make it possible to punish genocidal murderers and murdering states: at the 1933 international criminal law conference in Madrid, he proposed recognizing the “crime of barbarity” — mass extermination — and the “crime of vandalism” — the destruction of a nation’s cultural heritage. He was mocked. Who needed such international law?

And yet it was he who, fleeing occupied Poland through Lithuania to Sweden, and from there to the United States, which he reached in 1941, soon to become an advisor to the American government, told the world what was happening in occupied Poland. Drawing on reports of the fate of Poles under German occupation, he coined the concept of genocide. When, on December 9, 1948, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — the same convention under which the perpetrators of Rwanda and Cambodia were later tried — it was adopting a convention written by a Pole. Lemkin emphasized his Polishness to the very end. The world forgot him: he died in 1959 in New York, in poverty and obscurity.

Lemkin’s own story has itself fallen victim to posthumous distortion. This Polish Jew held a high prosecutorial office in the capital of the Second Polish Republic — evidence that Jewish citizens were treated on equal footing with others. He then ran a thriving law practice on Kredytowa Street in Warsaw. He was a lawyer of such standing and such trust that the Sanation government entrusted him with representing Poland at international legal conferences. Yet English-language biographies today claim he was a victim of antisemitism in the Second Polish Republic and that in September 1939 he was fleeing not the Germans, but the Poles. From his own memoirs we know the truth: he survived because Polish and Lithuanian villagers passed him from hand to hand, from settlement to settlement, until he made it to Sweden. Falsehood, then, reaches every level; at every level, the achievements of Poles are being obscured. In fighting for the memory of Rafał Lemkin, a Pole proud of his Polishness, we recall the dignity of the victims of genocide.

Jedwabne and Volhynia

In Jedwabne we speak of the victims of the German Nazis, and of a lie propped up by a ban on seeking the truth — a ban on exhumations. At the same time, exhumations are being restricted in Volhynia, where genocide against the Polish population was committed by Ukrainian nationalists, and where Ukraine is pursuing a politics of falsehood. And here, too, one can see how carefully this lie has been built on provocation. The Polish side is now being blamed for starting the “row over Volhynia,” even though its latest episode began with a Ukrainian special unit being named after the “heroes” of the UPA, who were guilty of genocide against Jews and Polish Catholics. A deliberate, calculated provocation, meant to strike at Polish memory and once again become a tool of falsehood.

In fighting for the truth, we fight for the dignity of the victims. We fight, of course, for the good name of Poland as well, because these victims were Poles. They have the right to have their identities established, and we will not establish them without exhumations and reliable research. They have the right to be identified, to have every name that can be determined inscribed on the pillars of a monument; to have the perpetrators identified and named in accordance with the truth. Only once the bodies have been exhumed and buried with dignity, once the victims have regained their names, and the perpetrators have been named, will it be possible to speak of a reckoning. Otherwise we will remain in limbo.

The right to truth flows from loyalty to one’s own citizens. Not only morality, but also the law, demands that these victims, and their memory, be placed under the care of the Republic of Poland and our national community.

It is a scandal that today the anniversary commemorations cannot be completed at the site of the crime, that one cannot pray over the grave of Polish citizens. There is, in fact, no grave. There is only a site of execution: fenced off, guarded, secured against us.

The Three Faces of Genocide

In Lemkin’s conception, the crime of genocide has three faces. The first is physical destruction — this is how Poles were exterminated during the war. The second is the suppression of a nation’s biological development: forced abortions, sterilization, the creation of living conditions such that children stop being born, so as to discourage the nation from bringing them into the world. The 1948 Convention explicitly recognizes this assault on future generations as genocide. The third face is the destruction of culture, without killing people. Genocide literally means: the killing of a kind. Lemkin called this form of the crime vandalism and sought to have the destruction of a nation’s culture written into the convention; this provision was struck from its final text, but in the intention of the concept’s creator, it remained an inseparable part of the crime. For if a community is effectively denationalized, stripped of its identity, and the monuments of its culture are torn down, the people will disappear — even if it still survives biologically.

Over the past century, Poland has passed through every stage of genocide: physical extermination, the biological suppression of successive generations, and finally an assault on identity, culture, and faith.

Emerging from Trauma

And it must be said plainly: we have not yet emerged from this process. We are still reaping the fruits of the genocidal policy. We still carry the consequences of an anti-natalist policy that suppressed the birth of successive generations of Poles. We are still struggling with a politics of shame — shame over our own culture, history, faith, over our own identity. Only once we recognize this will we understand that dignity must be restored — both to the victims and to ourselves — until that moment of purification in which pride will bloom anew in the nation: pride that we are bringing new generations into the world. Only then will we be able to say: we have left behind the patterns of slaves, we have ceased to be a colonized nation, because we want our children, we want the greatness of our nation, and we are proud of it.

We must finally be proud of our identity, our culture, and our faith; we must carry them openly, with our heads held high. Only then will we be able to say that we have healed from the trauma of genocide. That we are a free nation, one that is developing and is no longer shaped by the crimes of German, Russian, and Ukrainian perpetrators who, decade after decade, one after another, destroyed us physically, biologically, and culturally.

Jedwabne is an important place in this rebirth. Here we fight for our memory and our culture; here, through truth, we can heal from our trauma. And here, at the same time, we stand up for our citizens, murdered on the neighboring plot of land, who, eighty-five years on, are still denied a dignified burial, the remembrance of their names, and the truth about the identity of their executioners.

Adw. Jerzy Kwaśniewski — President of the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture