BLUNDER OF THE ‘GUARDIAN’
GRZEGORZ POLAK
In the ‘Guardian’ Kate Maltby criticized the British princely couple that before their recent visit in Poland they had participated in ‘whitening the current government of authoritative tendencies’. For whom it is terrible, it is. Everybody has a right to evaluate, also a journalist. It is not good when a journalist diverges with the truth, that is, he is telling a lie.
Maltby puts forward a thesis that the program of the visit of princess Kate and prince William was a part of a revisionary historical policy of the government because instead of the Auschwitz camp, associated with the tragedy of the Jews, the Stutthof camp was chosen to emphasize mainly the tragedy of Poles.
If the author writes about a country which he does not know, he has a duty to reach back to sources. It will take only a few minutes because they are within the reach of the hand – on internet – also in English. One can find out that KL Stutthof was experienced by 10 thousand prisoners from 28 countries. The biggest group - 50 thousand, nearly a half – were not Poles but the Jews. A strong missed hit.
Another thesis of the ‘Guardian’ is much more absurd. Maltby thinks that in Poland a similar policy is being pursued in Poland supported by the government and negating Holocaust’. Something which would not be written by the least reasonable opponent to the Law and Justice party but which appeared in the mind of the publicist of the journal known all over the world.
As an example she mentions removing information from textbooks about Polish participants in murders of the Jews and law forbidding to slander the Polish nation. Here we deal with the confusion of the issue. Our protests after publications which write about Polish death camps, is nothing else but a fight with falsifying history and blaming Poles for nothing. These frequent blunder committed by western politicians and media are a sign of unusual perfidy as Germany, the culprit of the cruelty on an unimaginable scale, is disappearing from the sight, and Cain’s fault falls onto victims, that is, Poles. We have a right to demand the truth!
However, it is not the worst in an article written in the ‘Guardian’. In order to discourage the British towards the terrible government in Warsaw’, the journal refers to ordinary slanders which have nothing in common with the reality at all.
For example, on 22 July this year I participated in a Remembrance March organized in Warsaw to commemorate 300 thousand Jewish inhabitants of the capital city, who 75 years ago, because of the ‘Reinhardt’ action, literally disappeared from the surface of the earth during a few weeks. They were murdered in the concentration camp in Tremblinka with a group of 600 thousand Jews from other regions of Poland and other countries of Europe.
Apart from the Jews, the march was also attended by a lot of Catholics. The Jews welcomed, among the others, Fr. Paweł Rytel-Adrianik, a spokesman of the Episcopate, very merited for documenting Poles’ help to the Jews during the Nazis occupation. There were also the representatives of authorities and parliamentarians which contradicts with the thesis of ‘The Guardian’ about negating Holocaust by the current government. But that is not all. At the end of the march, in front of the building of the Jewish Historic Institute, a speech was given by the vice-minister of culture and national heritage Jarosław Selin. He informed that the Museum of Fight and Martyrdom in Treblinka would no longer be a branch of the Regional Museum in Siedlce very soon, but it would become an independent institution. Raising the rank of this institution, the Polish government is doing something opposite to what it is accused of by ‘The Guardian’.
Moreover, the current government is trying to bring body remains of Szmul Zygielbojm to Poland from England, who was a member of the National Council of the Republic of Poland in London, and who committed a suicide on 12 May 1943, as a protest sign against the absolute passivity of the West towards genocide of the Jews. Zygielbojm wanted to be buried on the Polish land and his reburial will remind of the disgraceful silence of the West towards Holocaust.
We will defend ourselves against the slanders in Poland, due to the power of right arguments but another news about the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw has spread all over the world and it has surely been supported by the groups in the West hostile to it.
AA
„Niedziela” 32/2017