A former activist of the far-right nationalist Polish organization ONR, or the National Radical Camp, was appointed head of the branch of the Institute of National Remembrance in Opole, in southwestern Poland.
The Institute is one of the most important Polish institutions dealing with the history of World War II and communism. In its archives there are documents which detail crimes committed by Poles against Jews.
Tomasz Greniuch, a former ONR activist, was appointed to his new position last week.
ONR is now legally active, but before World War II it was a banned political party because it organized anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, a boycott of Jewish stores, and advocated the expulsion of Jews from Poland, modeled on Nazi activities.
Greniuch in an interview Friday with Radio Opole said that he had belonged to this organization, but that he spent his time in “self-education and reading books, instead of going to discos.”
The president of the Institute of National Remembrance, Jaroslaw Szarek, visited Washington on Friday, where he met with representatives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum.
“In Poland, we particularly understand the pain of the Jewish people, since we were victims of German totalitarianism from the first day of World War II,” Szarek said there.
The main purpose of the visit was to begin cooperation with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which will make its resources available to the Polish institution in January 2020.