Photo Credit: archives
The entrance to Auschwitz

Jaroslaw Kaczynski,

Head of Poland’s Law and Justice Party
ul. Nowogrodzka 84/86 02-018 Warsaw, Poland

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Dear Mr. Kaczynski,

My heart goes out to you over your dilemma to properly identify the mass extermination camps that the Nazis established on Poland’s sacred soil.

To call the camps Polish camps would suggest that Poland established them. This is clearly not true. To call them Jewish camps would suggest that the Jews initiated their own destruction. This formulation, while the wet dream of Jew haters is psychotic. To call them German camps would imply that the Poles collaborated in this enterprise. This is clearly unacceptable to the Polish people who while conquered, never gave up their pride in their country and the decency of their characters, and besides, today’s Poland wants to be friends with Germany, so calling the death facilities German, might not be rewarded with invitations to Oktoberfest.

Then there is the issue of calling these extermination factories camps. They were clearly not camps, a word that is associated with recreation. There was nothing recreational about Auschwitz- Birkenou, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

I urge you to discontinue calling these Jewish obliteration facilities camps. It would certainly be in order for your government to call them killing factories, or mass extinction complexes, or Jewish excision centers. I rather prefer the latter.

Any of these would not require identifying them by the nationality of the location, the sponsor of these activities or the religion of the victims, well maybe the religion of the victims could be relevant.

Oh, one more small point. It was reported that 300,000 Jews were killed by their Polish neighbors. While this is a very small percentage of Jews killed in WWII, and hardly deserving of a footnote in the history of humanitarian crimes, you might consider acknowledging these events, perhaps by showing pictures of happy Poles living in homes that used to be owned by Jews.

Thank you for reading and sharing my comments with the members of your party.

Lawrence C. Shapiro

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