By Jan Niechwiadowicz,
May 2009
David Peleg, the Ambassador of Israel to Poland: We,
being Jews and Israelis, with reject resolutely terminology such as
"Polish concentration camps". These prejudicial and erroneous phrases
represent primarily testimony about ignorance and lack of understanding of
fundamental historical truth. Every thinking man knows that it was the Nazis
who selected Poland
for central site for dreadful genocide of extermination of European Jews. On
the Polish soil the Germans built terrifying camps where they systematically
murdered 4.5 million Jews (including 3 million Polish Jews) and other
nationalities including thousands of Poles.
Regrettably for years the media especially in UK, US and Israel
have wrong referred to the German extermination programme in occupied Poland in a way
that implies the Poles were responsible.
Historical this mostly took the form of Polish Gas chambers, Polish ghettos, Polish concentration camp and Polish death camp.
Generally these mistakes were genuine and their meant they
were in Poland. The media in question often corrected their
mistake when informed. However in recent
years the German media has taken to referring to their camps as Polish. This resulted in the Polish government taking
action. The Auschwitz Birkenau was
officially renamed by the United Nations as Auschwitz Birkenau. German Nazi
Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945).
What is worrying to this writer is the way the success of
the Polish government, Polish organisations around the world and the Polonia in
fighting for Poland’s
good name has seemly resulted in the media changing their wording.
In the 2008 and especially since the start of 2009 we have
seem the used of Poland’s including Poland's
Sobibor Nazi death camp, Poland's Lodz ghetto, Poland's Treblinka and Sobibor
death camps, Germany’s and Poland’s concentration camps and Poland's most notorious death camp (see the Polish Media Issues group alert log).
There are other ways to blur the wording to make responsible
difficult. In the first four months of
2009 we saw death camps of Poland, Polish
ghetto and four concentration camps, ((Poles)) who allowed death camps to be
built and Treblinka, also in Poland, or any of the other Polish camps —
Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek.
The association is so strong that Poles are often seen as
worse than Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians and Romanians who were
responsible for far more Jewish deaths than Poland. Today we are seeing more and more attempts to
transfer the blame to Poland.
As American Jewish committee
said Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other
death camps, including Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and
Treblinka, were conceived, built and operated by Nazi Germany and its allies.
The camps were located in German-occupied Poland, the European country with
by far the largest Jewish population, but they were most emphatically not
"Polish camps". This is not a mere semantic matter. Historical
integrity and accuracy hang in the balance.”
Join the fight – Join the PMI.
