Dear Editors, I am writing to protest against the use of the highly misleading and offensive description of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau World War II Nazi German extermination camps as allegedly "Nazi-Polish" (Marchers set to depart for Poland, by Naomi Levin, The Australian Jewish News, Friday, Apr. 25, 2008 print edition and subsequent internet web editions).

The Australian-Polish community has been deeply disturbed and gravely offended by Ms Levin's article. This is a very hurtful slur, starkly contrasting with some key aspects of the speech made by Israel's president Shimon Peres at the very moving ceremony commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland's capital only about a week earlier. President Peres had clearly stated that Germany bears and should bear the responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust.

As your editors and Ms. Levin should know, most of Poland was directly, albeit illegally, incorporated into the Nazi German III Reich in 1939-44. This included the area next to Oswiecim on which the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz German Nazi concentration and extermination camps complex was established and operated by German Nazi authorities. The Germans also wholly controlled the remnant rump "General-Gouvernement Warschau" (GG), brutally ruled by the notorious Nazi major war criminal Hans Frank (later hanged at Nuremberg). Millions of Poles and Polish Jews were deported into the GG from other parts of occupied Poland. The first victims imprisoned and murdered in Auschwitz were Polish political prisoners.

Three and a half million Jewish Polish citizens and three million Gentile Polish citizens were killed by Nazi Germans in German-occupied Poland in 1939-45. There never were any "Nazi-Polish" collaborationist regime or "Nazi-Polish" political parties. Yet Ms Levin writes about the three-kilometre MOTL march "between two Nazi – Polish concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau".

The offensiveness and falsity of describing Auschwitz and Birkenau as allegedly "Nazi-Polish" is compounded by the fact that nowhere in the article is there a single mention of Nazi Germany or Germans. Despite the fact that the official UNESCO designation for Auschwitz (endorsed by Israel) is "Nazi German concentration camp in occupied Poland", all her references are to Poland and "Nazi-Polish" camps.

Ms Levin's article really implies a rewriting of history, absolving Nazi Germany of its World War II crimes. Instead, she implicitly blames Poland and the Poles for the murder of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monnowitz, and other death camps set up by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland in 1940-45. This is not just bewildering but also very sad.

Yours sincerely
Eugene Bajkowski
Media spokesman
Council of Australian Polish Organisations in the ACT