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The year 2005 marks the 60^th anniversary of the end of World War II. For us, it also means the 60^th anniversary of the return of the Western Territories to the Homeland. We have gained sufficient distance and historic perspective to reflect deeply on the responsibility for the war, its consequences and its presence in the contemporary awareness of states and societies. It is the Polish role to safeguard the historic truth, to resist its distortion and falsification.

Allow me, Mister Speaker, to make a short digression at this point. I believe the time is ripe, 60 years after the end of the war, for the elementary truth about what really happened in occupied Poland to come to the awareness of the representatives of the media in the community of the democratic states – in Europe, the United States and Canada– about who was the aggressor, the occupier, who built the death camps and murdered people there, and who was persecuted, subjugated and subjected to the German, Nazi policy of extermination. It was in Polish territories that the Germans created the largest camps of annihilation, where – alongside the Jewish people – Poles and members of other European nations were murdered on a mass scale. A few days from now, on 27^th January – marking the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz –Birkenau - the leaders of almost 40 nations will come to attend ceremonies in remembrance of those murdered at the site of that death camp. Today, a few days before the ceremonies that will focus the attention of the whole world, I call on representatives of press organizations, the Association of Polish Journalists and other organizations representing the Polish media, to address – independently of the appeals, corrections and diplomatic representations of the Polish MFA - a letter to their colleagues, and partner organizations of journalists around the world , telling them that the thoughtless or intentional use of the term “Polish death camps” is insulting and shameful. It not only conceals the truth about the perpetrators of that crime, but slanders our nation, which was the first victim of the criminal practices of Nazi Germany.

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For the full text of the address by Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld go to: http://www.msz.gov.pl/Ministers,Annual,Address,,2005,2132.html