DEATH CAMPS WERE NAZI GERMAN
LIDIA DUDKIEWICZ, THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF ‘NIEDZIELA’
Counterfeiters of history are still prowling. In relation to it, building historical policy is one of the most urgent tasks of the Polish country. For, there are plenty of facts insulting the good name of Poland. Absurds go beyond limits. We remember a setback of president Barack Obama last year who used the words „Polish death camp’ in a laudation to the honour of Jan Karski, proclaimed during a ceremony of posthumous honour of the heroic courier of the Polish Underground with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At that time Poles experienced a real shock. In relation to this type of facts, slandering the Polish nation, in the mid of the years 2016, a draft of a new act about the National Remembrance Institute was made, which says that who attributes responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation publicly and against facts, for war crimes, done by the Third German Reich against humankind, peace, is subject to punishment of fine or imprisonment.
There is no doubt that we cannot tolerate mistaking victims of the terrible crimes who are Poles with the culprits of Nazis crimes, who are the Germans. One of the examples of a fight with historical lies is the matter of prosecution of Karol Tendera, the former prisoner of the death camp Auschwitz, who demanded on public apologizing by the German TV station ZDF for using the term ‘Polish death camps’. The case got to the Appeal Court which stated that on the website of the TV station ZDF apologies had to be published. The TV station was to apologize the prisoner of Auschwitz on the first website. However, it did not comply with the verdict of the court, as it hid the apology for using the words ‘Polish death camps’ in the depth of the website. Therefore, it was necessary to intervene again. We also have the latest facts of the effective reaction. Redoubt of Good Name informed that an editorial office of a German radio-TV station Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk had apologized for using a lying formulation ‘Polish death camp’. Television BBC – after the intervention of the embassy in London – removed a suggestion from its website that Polish railwaymen, who had supervised transport to the German Nazis camp in Auschwitz, bear responsibility for Holocaust.
The billboard action to save the historical truth was taken by, among the others, Foundation of Traditions of Cities and Villages. Recently a mobile billboard has been made, on which there is the gate of the Auschwitz camp, an outline of the image of Adolf Hitler and the writing: ‘Death Camps were Nazi German’ and ‘ZDF Apologize’. The illuminated billboard set off into Europe as a sign of protest against falsifying history. It stopped in Germany, in Wiesbaden, outside the headquarter of the German television ZDF, which is the main addressee of the action. It also stopped at the headquarter of the TV station Deutsche Welle in Bonn. It got to London to the headquarter of the public television BBC. Organizers of the action also went to the university city Cambridge with the billboard, in order to tell professors and students the truth and deny the media lie slandering Poland. The action with the billboard had a symbolic character but it shows that Poles are already despaired and use all ways to tell mainly politicians and journalists, as well as historians and other people from the science groups that death camps were Nazi German and Poles were murdered in them.
AA
„Niedziela” 07/2017