The Fire Extinguisher and the Mirror: Poland’s Braun Problem

Poland’s Braun Problem: A Century of Antisemitism That Never Ended

When the Polish government summons the Israeli ambassador because Yad Vashem wrote that “Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear identifying marks,” there is more at stake than a dispute over words. The link in question led to an article stating clearly what every serious historian knows: the order of 23 November 1939 was issued by Hans Frank, the governor of the General Government, that is, German-occupied Poland.

And yet the Polish prime minister called the post “scandalous” and “obviously false,” and the foreign ministry demanded corrections as if Yad Vashem had accused the Polish state of inventing the yellow star. The full machinery of diplomatic outrage was mobilised not against Holocaust denial, not against antisemitic violence, but against a sentence that, at worst, is an imprecise shorthand for “German occupation of Poland.”

This is what I want to show: Poland can react with full force to a perceived insult from Yad Vashem, but cannot muster comparable moral energy to deal with Grzegorz Braun and the political tradition he represents.

Let us start with Braun. In December 2023, during a Hanukkah ceremony in the Polish Sejm, Braun approached with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the hanukkiyah, filling the hall with smoke and injuring a representative of the Jewish community. Later he described Hanukkah as “satanic worship” and said he felt no shame. Prosecutors charged him with insulting religious feelings and several other offences; he faces up to five years in prison.

This was not a one-off incident. The POLIN Museum, in an official statement, noted that Braun “does not conceal his antisemitic views” and that the attack on the hanukkiyah “is not the first incident involving this politician” – and yet “these incidents did not prevent him from obtaining a mandate in free and democratic elections.”

In 2025 Braun went further. In a radio interview he called the gas chambers of Auschwitz “fake,” repeated classic antisemitic motifs about ritual murder, and then travelled to Jedwabne to disrupt a ceremony commemorating the Jews murdered there. Prosecutors opened proceedings for Holocaust denial and hate speech.

At the same time Braun is a normalised political actor. He sits in the European Parliament, is part of the far-right Konfederacja milieu, and in the 2025 presidential election he won more than six percent of the vote in the first round – in an election where the combined result of the radical right reached roughly half of the electorate. He is also openly anti-European and part of a group of MPs calling for “de-escalation” with Russia in a way disturbingly close to Kremlin narratives.

So the scene looks like this:

On one side, a man who extinguishes Hanukkah candles with a fire extinguisher, calls them satanism, denies the gas chambers of Auschwitz and harasses participants in the Jedwabne commemoration – and who still represents part of Poland in Brussels.

On the other side, the full diplomatic apparatus of a democratic state unleashed against Yad Vashem because the wording of one tweet supposedly offends national honour.

To understand how dangerous this configuration is, we have to recall how much of Poland’s century of antisemitism has never really been worked through.

Before the war, the Second Polish Republic already had its own mechanisms of legalised antisemitism. The most notorious was the “ghetto benches” at universities: starting in 1935, first at the Lwów Polytechnic and then elsewhere, Jewish students were forced to sit in designated, segregated sections of lecture halls under threat of expulsion. It was not yet a yellow star, but it followed the same logic: mark the Jew, separate the Jew, teach the majority that exclusion is normal.

When Germany occupied Poland, it needed local enforcers. One of the main tools was the so-called “Blue Police” – a formation in blue uniforms, composed of ethnic Poles under German command. Historians have shown how these units guarded ghetto boundaries, hunted escapees and took part in mass deportations of Jews to extermination sites. In many localities it was the blue policemen who knocked on doors, dragged people into the streets and marched them to the trains.

Jedwabne is the name most often mentioned – and rightly so. On 10 July 1941 at least 340 Jewish residents of the town – men, women, children – were murdered by their Polish neighbours; many were driven into a barn and burned alive. German officials were present and encouraged the violence, but the direct perpetrators were a large group of local Poles from Jedwabne and surrounding villages. These facts were confirmed by an investigation of Poland’s own Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) between 2000 and 2003.

Jedwabne was not an exception. In Kraków in August 1945, an antisemitic rumour about kidnapped Christian children triggered a pogrom: a mob attacked Jews and set fire to the Kupa Synagogue, with soldiers and policemen among the main instigators. Less than a year later, on 4 July 1946, came the Kielce pogrom: soldiers, militia and civilians assaulted a building housing Holocaust survivors, killing 42 Jews and injuring many others – again on the basis of a fabricated story about ritual murder of a child. The result was terror and another exodus: in the wake of the pogrom roughly 100,000 Jews left the country.

Two decades later came 1968. The communist authorities, under the slogan of an “anti-Zionist” campaign after the Six-Day War, launched a state-organised antisemitic witch-hunt. Jews were branded as disloyal, dismissed from their jobs, beaten, interrogated and forced to emigrate. Between 13,000 and 25,000 Polish Jews left, often with the note “without right of return”; those who departed lost their citizenship. March 1968 did not just close a chapter – it almost completely ended organised Jewish life in Poland.

What links these episodes is not a single ideology, but a recurring pattern:

Mark the Jew.

Separate the Jew.

Drive out the Jew.

Then tell yourself the story that you were powerless, innocent, “only following orders,” or that it was all the fault of the Germans, the communists, the Russians – anyone but your own society.

This is why the current conflict with Yad Vashem over a tweet is not a triviality. The aim of the Polish government’s reaction is not historical precision – Yad Vashem itself stresssed that the identification badges were ordered by German authorities in occupied Polish territory. The aim is to defend a carefully constructed narrative in which Polish guilt is always marginal, ambiguous or “unproven,” while Polish suffering is central, unique and beyond question.

Serious historians, in Poland and abroad – from Jan Gross and Jan Grabowski to Elżbieta Janicka and many others – have described the darker sections of this history, often at the cost of their own security and careers. Their work does not show a nation of monsters, but a nation like many others: capable of heroism and rescue, but also of complicity, opportunism and violence. Nationalist politics has responded by attacking these scholars, passing laws that chill discussion of Polish participation in the Holocaust, and building museum narratives that foreground heroism while marginalising Jewish suffering.

In such a landscape, someone like Braun is not an aberration – he is a symptom. In grotesque form he repeats a long tradition of erasing Jewish presence from public space – this time not by hiding it, but by humiliating it live, in front of cameras. He turns the Hanukkah menorah into a target and Hanukkah itself into a provocation. When he goes to Jedwabne to disrupt a memorial ceremony, he sends a very clear message: your memory is still not welcome here.

The state’s response is, at best, ambivalent. Yes, prosecutors open investigations. Yes, the Sejm lifts his immunity and imposes fines. But Braun remains an MP; his milieu retains significant electoral strength; and there is still no clearly drawn red line stating that a man who denies Auschwitz, desecrates Hanukkah and disrupts Holocaust commemorations is not a worthy representative of the Republic of Poland.

Set this against the speed and fury with which Warsaw reacts to Yad Vashem. In one case, antisemitism is treated as an unfortunate excess of free speech. In the other, historical memory is supervised with surgical precision to protect the national ego.

That is why I speak of Poland’s Braun problem. The problem is not one politician; the problem is a political ecosystem that has never digested its own century of antisemitism and therefore continues to produce new variants of the same virus.

From ghetto benches to the Blue Police, from Jedwabne and Kielce to March 1968, Poland has accumulated layer upon layer of unprocessed violence against its Jewish citizens. Each time the pattern was similar: strike, expel, erase the traces, and then declare yourself the greatest victim of all.

Today, when a man with a fire extinguisher in parliament and a microphone at Auschwitz can still be a presidential candidate and a member of the European Parliament, the message to Jews – in Poland and beyond – is painfully familiar: you may be an object of commemoration, but not a fully accepted subject of political life.

And when the state uses its diplomatic capital not to isolate such figures, but to attack Yad Vashem over an awkwardly phrased sentence about German decrees in occupied Poland, the world has every right to ask: what exactly is being defended here – historical truth, or the right never to look in the mirror?

Poland does not need another round of self-pitying narrative wars. It needs something far harder and more honest: to say publicly, without footnotes, that part of its society helped mark, hunt, rob and kill its Jewish neighbours; that the state – pre-war, communist and democratic – repeatedly failed to protect Jews; and that anyone who today plays with the ashes of that history for political gain is not a patriot but an heir to the worst traditions of Dmowski’s nationalism.

Until that sentence is spoken, Braun will not be an exception. He will be a warning of what is still to come.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig