That's the phrase President Obama used while recognizing a Polish war hero who reported the presence of death camps in Poland during World War II. The remark has been noted in Poland, and they are none too happy with it.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/30/white-house-says-obama-misspoke-after-poles-demand-apology-over-polish-death/?test=latestnews
To be clear, Poland was occupied by the Germans when the death camps were constructed during the war. Aside from the most infamous, Auschwitz, other camps were set up in Poland with the express purpose of exterminating people. They were Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmo and Belzec. They were either located in the area annexed by Germany or the so-called General Governement, occupied by the Germans and run by Hans Frank (executed at Nuremberg as a war criminal).
The distinction is sensitive for the Poles. That is not to say that Polish history doesn't have its own historical issues with anti-Semitism. Many surviving Jews were killed in Poland after the war ended.
Is this an innocent semantic mistake by Obama, or does he suffer from a lack of knowledge about world history?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Let's not kid ourselves, when the ghettos were operational in Warsaw, Lotz and elsewhere in Poland, life went on outside those walls. Some 3.5 million Jews were killed in Poland alone. This does not happen without massive complicity. You correctly mentioned that pogroms occurred in Poland after th Nazis were defeated. Lastly, many of my family members were murdered in the concentration camps. Those few who servived spoke of the the antisemitism which was pervasive in Poland long before the nazis. The message here is simple. This is part of their history and if someone is sensitive about this, he needs to get over himself.
Post a Comment