On 22nd February 2008, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim at the Polish Embassy in Canberra, Mr Witold Krzesiński, sent a letter of protest to the editor in chief of the Australian edition of “Marie Claire” monthly regarding the use of the phrase “Polish concentration camp of Auschwitz”, which appeared in the article of 9.01 (Internet edition), subsequently published in the February issue of the magazine. Chargé d’Affaires requested that the letter should be published both on the website as well as in the printed edition of the magazine. The letter was also published on the website of the Embassy (www.poland.org.au).

        I would like to draw your attention to the fact that your story “We were part of a human experiment” (9 January in the Internet-issue) contains a serious distortion of historical facts. In the second part of the article, titled “Other human experiments”, you mention the “Polish concentration camp Auschwitz” as a site where the “Angel of Death”, Dr Josef Mengele, committed his terrible war crimes. It is, unintentionally perhaps, an obvious implication that the Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (according to the official UNESCO terminology) in German-occupied Poland was allegedly Polish.

        The words German or Germany do not appear in the article. Readers without a thorough historical knowledge of World War II might well therefore conclude that these experiments were conducted by a Polish citizen (Dr Josef Mengele) in a Polish-run concentration camp. Is this the message you wanted to send to your readers?

        Let me explain (if it is not obvious to you) that Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, a small Polish town forcibly incorporated into the German Third Reich after the German invasion in September 1939. The entire Auschwitz death camps compound was established and operated by German Nazis, not anybody else.  Dr Mengele was of course German. Poland was never an ally of Nazi Germany and never had a collaborative regime. In contrast to some other nations, Poland never capitulated as a state to the German Third Reich. More than six million Polish citizens were killed during World War II - half of them Jews. By the way, the American Jewish Committee has officially condemned the usage of the above expression.

        I am sure that many Poles and, I believe, also other people would be indignant about the term used in the article. It would be advantageous for the maintenance of your readership not to include it in the Polish edition of “Marie Claire”.

Witold Krzesiński
Chargé d’Affaires a.i.

        It was the second intervention by the Embassy regarding press articles on “Polish death camps" within a matter of a few weeks. The Embassy as well as the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Sydney asked the Polish community to send letters of protest to editors of magazines publishing articles defaming the Republic of Poland.