The term legacy of the past when used in reference to the Polish nation embraces both moral and legal aspects. I am well aware how trite it may sound to say - in this hall - that the legacy of the nation’s past cannot be accepted with “the benefit of inventory”. In this sense we today cannot limit our own responsibility for the past of the nation to which we belong.

In other words, the past is not a supermarket from the shelves of which we can pick and choose only those events for which we are ready and willing to pay the price, the price spelled out by history, but also by the present. The legacy of the past is in fact our responsibility – for the moral and legal stanza on which the evil of the past, the crimes of the past, stand. This not only concerns the fact that we were victims, but also that we committed crimes. In this sense evil knows no nationality. No nation can set itself free from responsibility for its past towards other nations.

This is the axiology of the law governing the activities of the Institute of National Remembrance – The Commission for the Prosecution of the Crimes against the Polish Nation – of which I have been Chairman since June 2000.

The Institute of National Remembrance was obliged to take over and implement legal analyses for evaluation of crimes committed against the Polish nation after 1st September 1939, that is since the outbreak of World War II. But under the term “crimes against the Polish nation”, Polish law understands not only crimes committed against Polish citizens, regardless of the country they were committed in, but also crimes against the citizens of other nationalities committed on the territory of occupied Poland. In other words, crimes against the Polish nation not only concern Poles, but also crimes against Jews, Gypsies and the victims of all other nations committed on the territory of the occupied Polish state, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators of those crimes.
Such crimes began on Polish territory on 1st September 1939, that is from the beginning of World War II. According to evidence in the hands of the Institute of National Remembrance the murder of civilians – Poles and Jews – was committed not only by SS units, but also those of the Wehrmacht, and Luftwaffe.

There is something in the Polish character which obliges us to concentrate on the German attack on the Westerplatte as the start of World War II.Westerplatte came under fire at 4:45 on the 1st of September from the armoured German ship Schleswig - Holstein before the Polish military post undertook a heroic and illmatched fight against the German invader. It was with some bewilderment and a certain disbelief that Polish public opinion received the information from the Institute of National Remembrance last year that the truth in this case is slightly different. World War II began several minutes before that attack on Westerplatte when the Luftwaffe bombed the defenceless sleeping town of Wieluñ. Over 1400 civilians died in their sleep that night. I have called Wieluñ the Polish Guernica, though it is a tragedy that has not been immortalised by a great painter. And maybe this is why it remains unknown to a wider public. It might also be so because we Poles prefer to remember those events that made us heroes despite the fact that the struggle was already doomed to fail. We are less willing to cast our minds back to events when we were simply passive victims.

The crimes against civilians committed by the Wehrmacht in September 1939 concerned to an equal degree all citizens of the Polish state – of both Polish and Jewish nationalities. The perpetrators of those crimes – Wehrmacht and also Luftwaffe officers and soldiers – were exonerated from criminal responsibility by German prosecutors after the war on the grounds that killing Poles and Jews was ruled “normal and allowed under the Hague Convention on military actions”.

After the battles ended in the autumn of 1939, the German occupiers started planning the systematic murder of the Polish intelligentsia with the aim of destroying the Polish nation’s leading force, as German documents from the period prove. At the same time the murderous act of annihilating the Polish intelligentsia also engulfed Polish citizens of Jewish nationality.

Several months later, on Stalin’s command, the Katyñ Crimes were committed, termed so after the town where mass graves of the victims of these crimes were found. In the spring of 1940, the Soviet NKWD murdered 22,000 Polish citizens: officers, policemen and members of the Polish intelligentsia. Among the victims of this crime – according to evidence collected so far – were more than 1000 Jews. All the victims were Polish citizens whom the NKWD considered “intransigent and unreformable enemies of the Soviet Union”. Poland has treated all victims of the Katyñ Crimes as heroes of the Polish nation.And this obliges us to the undertake all efforts today aimed at formulating – together with Russian lawyers – a legal assessment of this act of genocide inflicted on the Polish nation.

The Nazi occupier made the occupied Polish territory the place where “Endlösung der Judenfrage” was to take place – “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. A lot has been said and written about the Poles’ attitude to the Holocaust that was carried out on Polish soil. I would like to highlight one aspect of this “legacy of the past” based on my own experience as the Chairman of the Institute of National Remembrance. Several months ago, a Polish citizen was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment having been found guilty by the prosecutor from the Institute of National Remembrance of voluntarily taking part in murdering Jewish victims in gas chambers in trucks in the concentration camp in Chelmno near Nerem (Kolmhof) in exchange for the promise of receiving “Volksdeutsch” status. His sentence, after 60 years, was possible only because there were Polish witnesses who stood before the Polish court and gave evidence which fully justified the sentence of the Polish perpetrator. These, the most important witnesses in the trial, were simple and honest people who told of what they had seen as inhabitants of Chelmno during the extermination and what the role of the accused was in the annihilation of Jews.Without their evidence – stemming from their moral courage – the sentence in this case would not have been made. Therefore I would like to formulate a question: what defines the attitude of Poles to the Holocaust? Are these the acts of accused people of Polish nationality or the attitudes of Polish witnesses who recognised the guilty party after so many years and considered it their moral obligation to tell the truth about his crimes despite his being also of Polish nationality?

It is not my intention to convince you that there are no signs of anti-Semitism in Poland. I’m not hiding the fact that I have also painfully experienced it myself when – acting on moral duty – I said that the Jewish inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne perished on 10 July 1941 also at the hands of Poles. If we have named this crime ‘a crime against the Polish nation’ it was because the Jewish inhabitants of this town were citizens of the Polish state. The present Polish state has an obligation to restore their human and civic dignity. This is also the reason for conducting the investigation in this case. However, I have to remind you that the Polish perpetrators of this crime and one German military policeman were sentenced by a Polish court in 1949 also on the basis of the evidence given by witnesses – also inhabitants of Jedwabne. Today we know that not all the perpetrators participating in murdering Jewish inhabitants of this town were brought to trial. How many of them and why they managed to avoid the responsibility ill soon be settled by the investigation nearing its end.

After the war, there were 5 000 perpetrators of Nazi crimes brought to court, among them Germans, Austrians and Volksdeutches. They were tried, assessed from today’s perspective, in honest trials. This legacy of the past gives the present Polish state legitimacy as a law-based state.

Nevertheless, it has also to be said that at this time when post-war Poland saw a lot of honest and just trials, when the perpetrators of Nazi crimes were sentenced, Polish judges and Polish prosecutors also committed legal crimes in sentencing to death Polish patriots whom the regime of those years treated as its political opponents. The contemporary Polish state as a law-based state has the obligation to prosecute those criminal judges and prosecutors in order to restore their victims’ human and civic dignity.
In today’s Poland one can also hear the opinion that the lawless apparatus, with its political police, was created directly after the war by Polish citizens of Jewish nationality. It is said that Poles in turn were the victims of Stalinist lawlessness and violence to which the Jews also served as secret informers. In turn, this alleged participation of Jews – Polish citizens – in the persecution of other Polish citizens has been said led to murders, and also pogroms (including the pogrom in Kielce in July 1946 in which over 40 Jews were murdered). However, one has to remember that in this case a Polish court sentenced the perpetrators – Polish inhabitants of Kielce – to death. And if today the Institute of National Remembrance conducts an investigation concerning this case, it is to elucidate the details of this crime and all its surrounding circumstances.

The role of the Institute of National Remembrance has also been to open secret archives that have to date remained closed to the public. This is a painful experience of the past for many who read these files and find out today that their denouncers were those often considered good Poles.

Evil has no nationality, but it takes the combined courage of a nation to look at itself in this way. Polish legislators showed such courage in passing the law on the Institute of National Remembrance. Will I – as the chairman of this Institute – have all the necessary courage to realise this law consistently – in taking a legal and moral stand towards the crimes of the past? It is not I – I think – who will be the judge of that.

But there is one thing I can assure you of. I will not lack the courage to hear such a judgement of the actions of the Institute of National Remembrance, regardless of the nationality or citizenship of those who formulate such a judgement.