Brooklyn, N.Y. … Polish Americans are getting sick and tired of the nasty little habit a lot of the media have in blaming Poland for the Holocaust.
One of the most frequent ways they do it is by describing the concentration camps the Germans operated to kill Jews, Poles and other victims as “Polish” instead of German, according to Frank Milewski of the Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee.
The Germans built and ran concentration camps throughout Europe in the countries they conquered. The media correctly identify them as “German camps.”
But when they report on Poland, they prefer to say the German camps were “Polish,” said Milewski. “When we contact them to correct it, they give us the lame excuse the camps are “Polish” because they were geographically
located in Poland. That the Germans were killing people inside those camps seems less significant to them.”
Is it brazen malice, an oversight or just plain Holocaust ignorance? “Sometimes it’s sheer stupidity,” said Milewski.
He cited a recent incident where a major American newspaper foolishly referred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a “Polish” camp. The only problem was that Sachsenhausen was located in Germany, not far from Berlin.
The Germans built it and opened it in 1936 even before World War II began in 1939. It was run by the Germans and most of the prisoners there were German.
One Polish American who got fed up reading this kind of “nonsense” was Anthony Miller of Dover, Delaware who immediately penned a rebuttal to The Wilmington News Journal. He also sent a copy of his complaint to the Polish American Journal in Buffalo, New York as a point of information.
The Polish community has developed an information network to advise each other about anti-Polish bias when they come across it. This is the way Milewski says the Polish American Congress is kept abreast of anti-Polish incidents it has to deal with.
The article that stirred Mr. Miller’s concerns also appeared on the newspaper’s website so that the Congress was able to verify the mislabeling of the German camp as “Polish.”
It was a story about a student who collected names of Jewish Holocaust victims to be registered at Israel’s Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Milewski immediately felt the misidentification of the concentration camp had to be an oversight without any evil intent. “Someone writing about Yad Vashem has to know what’s inside the Memorial and would find it hard to express ill will against the Polish people.”
The Yad Vashem Memorial is a place where the Polish people are held in high esteem. They are honored there as “Righteous Among the Nations” for rescuing Jews during the German occupation of Poland.
Poland was the only country in all German-occupied Europe where the Nazis gave the order to kill any Pole who gave any kind of help to a Jew, according to Milewski.
“Despite such a bone-chilling threat, more Poles are honored at Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews than anyone else. More Poles were killed for rescuing Jews than anyone else. If you write about Yad Vashem you would have to know that,” he said.
Sure enough, he was correct in assuming the misidentification was an oversight. Before he could reach for a phone to discuss the problem with the News Journal the next morning, Mr. Miller’s letter correcting the mistake was already published in the paper’s Letters column.
“It’s the first time we know of that a paper made a correction of an error in its next day edition.
The News Journal told us they felt bad about it and understood our point of view. We personally thanked them for the correction and we commend Mr. Miller for his initiative to complain to the paper and advise the rest of the Polish community about the problem,” he said.
Not all publications respond as positively as The News Journal. The Polish American Congress often confronts stubborn and arrogant editors who misinformed their readers about Poland.
“They know they were wrong but they just won’t budge. We could even organize a protest demonstration in front of their offices and they’ll just thumb their imperious noses at us.”
