Ted Kempinski · April 19, 2026 · tedaction.org

On April 14, 2026 — the very day thousands gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau for the annual March of the Living — far-right Polish parliamentarian Konrad Berkowicz stood at the rostrum of the Sejm and held up an Israeli flag with the Star of David replaced by a swastika. “Israel is the new Third Reich,” he declared, “and its flag should look exactly like this.”

The gesture was not spontaneous provocation. It was a calculated deployment of what scholars have long identified as Holocaust inversion — the rhetorical and symbolic strategy of turning the memory of Nazi genocide against the Jewish people themselves, recasting victims as perpetrators.

Why This Moment Is Different

Berkowicz is a member of Confederation (Konfederacja), a far-right opposition bloc holding 16 of the Sejm’s 460 seats, a fringe formation, but one with a significant social media megaphone. What distinguishes this incident is not the ideology behind it, which is neither new nor surprising, but the timing and the venue.

To display a swastika on the floor of the Polish parliament on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as survivors and descendants walked between the ruins of Auschwitz and Birkenau, is to use sacred memorial space as a backdrop for antisemitic theater.

Poland is not incidental geography here. Poland is the epicenter of Holocaust memory. It is the country that lost three million Jewish citizens. The moral weight of what happens in that parliament, on that date, carries an entirely different register than the same act performed elsewhere.

The Institutional Response

The response from Polish institutions was swift and largely appropriate. Prime Minister Donald Tusk condemned the incident, stating there is no place for antisemitism in Polish public life. The Polish Foreign Ministry noted that criticism of Israeli policy does not justify such a gesture, which is deeply offensive not only to Jews and Israelis but also to all those for whom the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes constitute an important element of memory and identity. The parliament speaker referred the matter to legal authorities on suspicion of publicly insulting the flag of a foreign state and promoting Nazism. Berkowicz has since been penalized with a reduction of half his parliamentary salary for three months.

These responses matter. They demonstrate that Polish civil and political society, at the mainstream level, has not normalized this discourse. That is worth acknowledging clearly.

What Remains Unresolved

And yet the incident exposes a deeper structural tension that a salary penalty does not resolve. The conflation of criticism of Israeli government policy with the systematic demonization of Jewish identity is not limited to the far-right fringe. It is a feature of broader European political discourse that requires serious intellectual and moral engagement, not merely legal sanction.

Holocaust inversion is not criticism. It is the annihilation of historical meaning, a form of symbolic violence that denies the Jewish people even the integrity of their own historical trauma. Those of us working in Jewish-Christian dialogue and interfaith memory must be able to distinguish vigorously between legitimate moral inquiry into contemporary geopolitical events and the exploitation of Holocaust memory as a weapon.

That distinction is not always easy. But the Polish Sejm on April 14, 2026 was not a difficult case. It was an unambiguous one — and it demands an unambiguous response.

Ted Kempinski writes on issues involving the Holocaust and Memory Activism.