On 27 June 2008, the US weekly publication “Forward” published a letter from the Polish Consul General in New York, Krzysztof W. Kasprzyk, entitled “Sobibor wasn’t Polish” in reference to the article “comic Explorer Shoah”, which appeared in the publication on 13 June. The author of the article used the phrase “Polish extermination camp Sobibor”.
        The correction is also available on the “Forward” website – www.forward.com/articles/13604.

Sobibor Wasn’t Polish

A June 13 Shmooze article on Holocaust-themed graphic novels refers to Sobibor as a “Polish extermination camp” (“Comic Explores Shoah”).

After a relatively long absence of such mindlessly insulting and history-falsifying nonsense, we were shocked to again find it again in print — and all the more so in a Jewish newspaper like the Forward.

Any time a newspaper labels a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland as “Polish,” it devilishly switches the perpetrators and the victims. These historically false simplifications take the blame off of the Nazis and put it on others — specifically, us Poles.

I am quite aware of the unfortunate ambiguity of the English language, which may define “Polish death camps” as camps that are geographically located in Poland. But at the same time, people of limited or no knowledge about the atrocious German genocide machine might fall under the false impression that death camps of that era were Polish — that is, devised, built and operated by Poles.

Krzysztof Kasprzyk
Consul General
Republic of Poland
New York, N.Y.