| It is bewildering and painful that a day after Poland's President Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria were buried on Cracow, following the tragic air crash at Smolensk, and when 94 other victims of this horrible disaster are still being laid to rest - and also on Israel's Remembrance Day - "The Australian" decided to run as page 3 lead a story from its experienced and influential Jerusalem correspondent Abraham Rabinovich that quite literally labelled Auschwitz as "the Polish concentration camp" ("Auschwitz private memorial irks Israel", 19/4/10).
This is distressing, offensive and, frankly, disgusting for the Australian-Polish community. Particularly, following the generous tributes paid to the memory of the late President Kaczynski by Israel's President, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and such respected Jewish media as the JTA. Whether a freudian slip, careless slopiness or a carefully timed deliberate and provocative insinuation, this ascrbing of responsibility for the "Nazi" German war crimes, including the Jewish Holocaust, to Poland and the Poles carries sinister implications.
Not once does Rabinovich's artcicle even hint that the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp complex was established and operated by Germans on territory seized from Poland and illegally incorporated into the German "Nazi" Third Reich following the German invasion in 1939. Nor that Poles were its first victims - not the organisers or perpetrators. Why?
Following Mr. Rabinovich's inverse logic of reverse responsibility, the 1940 Katyn massacre would also be a Polish and not Stalinist crime since the victims were Polish officers and murderers the Soviet NKVD. It may be pointless reminding Mr. Rabinovich (and once again some of "The Australian's editors, who all should know better) that in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as earlier in Katyn, the murdered victims were both Jews and Poles (and others from 20 countries, nations and races), in Auschwitz mainly Polish and other Jews and in Katyn "Christian Poles": - but also over 400 Polish-Jewish army serving and reserve officers, including Jewish military chaplains. Their memory should be respected.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a German and not a Polish concentration and death camp. As were Treblinksa, Majdanek, Sobibor and so many other murder factories established and operated by Germans in German-occupied Poland and not by Poles as implied by Mr. Rabinovich's article. Certainly, he would know better than accuse the Poles of running German extermination camps in 1939-45. So what is the motivation at a time when Israel needs friends rather than critics and adversaries?
Eugene Andrew Bajkowski
Media spokesperson
the Australian-Polish Concil of the ACT
| 
