Auschwitz-intellectual dishonesty or disinformation
Warsaw, Poland -April 10, 2006 Poland has requested a name change for the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp complex. Information about the name change and circumstances surrounding it were previously published by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Background Links
Auschwitz Name Change By BBC.
Auschwitz International Ignorance
Auschwitz Renaming Comments
The article by the British Broadcasting Corporation says in part:
Unesco's current description of Auschwitz says that the "fortified walls, barbed wire, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and cremation ovens show the conditions within which the Nazi genocide took place in the former concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich."
However, Mr Kasprzyk added: "The proposed change in the name leaves no doubt as to what the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was."
The Polish government made the request to change the name in writing to Unesco - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
This name change has sparked a controversy in Poland and has prompted some comments to be sent to the Editor of this new service. Because of the nature of the comments that we have received an because of the continual barrage of comments that we receive through our website we make the following observations:
Our website, The MasterPage, provides a great deal of travel information as part of our efforts to promote incoming tourism to Poland. We found that the most popular destination for the largest incoming tour operator in Poland is the Auschwitz complex. We therefore created many pages that provide information for people interested in coming to Poland to visit the Auschwitz complex.
Those web pages give people the ability to contact us directly by e-mail. And the e-mail we get from people who are interested in visiting the complex is, many times, quite startling. The Polish staff of the MasterPage react to this e-mail with feelings of embarrassment, outrage, insult, and a sense that history is dealing with them unfairly.
Here are some quotations from email that were received by this website in the past 30 days.
"My grandmother wants to visit Poland to see Auschwitz. But I heard that Poland is not safe for Jews. Is Poland safe for Jews?"
"Can you recommend hotels in Poland where Jews will not be in danger?"
"Are Jewish people still attacked in Poland? My father was Jewish what my mother is Catholic. Will I be safe in Poland?"
"My friend told me that the trains in Poland are dirty and that the trains to Auswitz are the dirtiest because the Polish government knows that many Jewish people write those trains. I don't understand why Poland still hates the Jews. Can you help me arrange a decent transportation for my family. "
And then in the course of our publishing our newsletter, the subject of visas for Poles to the U.S. often comes up. Here's an email we recently received on this matter.
"You f--king Polacks are jew killers. You and your German friends killed millions of Jews. You are not wanted in the United States."
Over the years we have received thousands of emails carrying a similar tone - Poland is a jew hating country and during the Second World War Poland ran death camps to eliminate the Jewish people from Poland.
I insert here an email response to one of the articles that we have recently published concerning the name change at the Auschwitz Birkenau complex.
I agree with your earlier writer. Renaming Auschwitz -- which is known internationally as Auschwitz and the name change will do nothing to alter that fact -- is unnecessary to the point of absurd. Anyone who doesn't know that the Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis is not going to learn anything from a change in the name. The observation that people all over the world refer to Auschwitz and other Nazi death, labor and concentration camps as "Polish" is easily explained as a geographic designation. The main and best known camps were in what is today Poland. What else is one to call Auschwitz, a Silesian camp? Other than Poles and a few Germans well into the autumn of their lives, who knows where Silesia is? The Polish government surely has better things to do. I'd rather they find and expose the CIA Secret Prisons than worry about the name applied to places whose notoriety dates from more than 60 years ago. For Poles, Jews, and Germans of the present generation, moves toward real reconciliation and acceptance are far more imporant than continuing the fingerpointing and recriminations.
This is typical of a response from an uninformed person who is not only uninformed but so totally insensitive to what happened to the Jewish people, the Polish people, and people's from all other nations who were made prisoners of Auschwitz, that it is embarrassing. To simply pass off the lack of information about the true nature of the Auschwitz camps as easily explained as a geographic designation demonstrates an intellectual laziness that one would hope would not be too widespread among the population at large. To further combine the issue with some political agenda whose intent is only to foster the writer ' s political goals is crass and insulting to staff at this web page service whose Polish family saw the death of a grandparent as a result of being a Polish prisoner of Auschwitz.
And that is a lot of what this issue is about. Many people could care about the proper presentation of history and are only concerned about their own political agendas. For those interested in prisoners rights, were they really interested in human rights and the treatment of prisoners they would be actively engaged in correcting the abuses so conveniently overlooked in Europe everyday. About Prisons In Europe One can only question their motives.
There those of you that feel that Poland should let bygones be bygones and allow history to be rewritten rather than to stand up and demand that history be written properly. And there are those people, such as the people at the World Jewish Congress, who are more than willing to accommodate them and to rewrite history to put the blame for the camps on Poland
There are also Polish people who do not accept such abuse and feel the record should be set straight. The Polish government is apparently made up of some people who think that the record should be set straight.
The changing of a few words on the gate to the camp will not be lost on every visitor to the camp. If there is a way to heal wounds for the Polish people and the Jewish community , it is by publicizing the fact that the Auschwitz Birkenau death camps were not Polish death camps . They were Nazi German death camps unique to the Nazi German savages of the past that killed millions.
Jewish people, now on the board of the Auschwitz complex museum, who were prisoners of Auschwitz, stay strongly that Auschwitz was not Polish and they agree that the name should be changed to be sure that there is no misunderstanding.
We agree with those former prisoners of Auschwitz and with the innocent Poles who never did, and never will, accept what happened at Auschwitz.
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