Andrzej Duda, a Conservative Catholic politician who won Sunday’s presidential elections in Poland, has criticized the outgoing president’s apologies in recent years for the massacre that Polish farmers perpetrated against their Jewish neighbors in Jedwabne.
The 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were burned alive by villagers who trapped them inside a barn, was exposed in the early 2000s by the historian Jan Gross. The discovery triggered furious reactions by Polish nationalists.
In a presidential debate last week, the outgoing president, Bronislaw Komorowski defended his acknowledgement of the complicity of some his countrymen in the Holocaust.
Reiterating his past statements on the subject, Komorowski, 62, said during the debate: “The nation of victims was also the nation of perpetrators.”
Duda called Komorowski’s statements an “attempt to destroy Poland’s good name. ‘’
According to him, the whole Polish nation cannot be blamed for war crimes, as Komorowski’s apologies seem to indicate.
Duda is a member of the conservative right-wing Law and Justice Party.
Duda, whose father-in-law Julian Kornhauser is a well-known Polish-Jewish poet, garnered 52 percent of the vote, according to official results. Komorowski, received 48 percent of the vote.