The legislation has been approved by Prime Minister Beata Szydlo’s cabinet and is expected to pass easily in parliament, where the nationalistic right-wing Law and Justice party has a majority.
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Polish parliament is dominated by the ruling Law and Justice party, who promised the law on Nazi death camps during the election campaign past year.
After complaints from Poles, including then-Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, a representative of the Obama administration said the president had “misspoken” and “was referring to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland”.
Poles fear that as the war grows more distant younger generations across the world will incorrectly assume that Poles had a role in running Auschwitz, Treblinka and other German death camps, a bitter association for a nation that was occupied and subjected to brutality that left some 5.5 million Polish citizens dead during the war, about 3 million Jews and 2.5 million non-Jews.
As a Polish search committee started digging this week for a train presumably filled with Nazi gold taken from Jews, the country’s lawmakers debated a ban of terms such as “Polish concentration camps” and “Polish death camps”.
The bill had been under discussion for many months and originally foresaw a prison term of up to five years.
Moreover, historians are anxious that the party might attempt to make it more hard to discuss the culpability of at least some Poles in Nazi crimes.
“The new provisions penalize these insulting terms, which undermine Poland’s reputation”, a government statement said.
Millions of Jews were killed by Hitler’s Nazi regime during World War II, many in concentration camps the German militia established in Poland during its occupation between 1939 and 1945.
The entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi-era concentration camp has the lettering “Arbeit macht frei” (‘Work makes you free’).
People demonstrate during an anti-government rally in Gdansk, Poland January 23, 2016.
There were also Poles who risked their lives to help Jews.
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Gross is a PiS bête noire, asking hard questions of Polish-Jewish relations, often running counter to traditional Polish self-perceptions.
