05.09.2011: The Polish camp issue. By Chris Dziadul
The Polish camp issue. By Chris Dziadul
Almost 40 years ago a documentary series named The World at War aired for the first time on British television. A highly ambitious project, it covered all aspects of the Second World War, from the rise of the Nazis to the Nuremburg Trials that followed their defeat. Its strength lay in archive film footage, much of it never seen before by the general public, and, perhaps more importantly, the many interviews it featured with highly placed people on both sides of the conflict.
Those people are now nearly all dead, and although The World at War is still shown on little-watched thematic channels, the conflict is fast receding from collective memory. Which is tragic, because by ignoring the mistakes of the past we stand to make those mistakes again in the future.
This has already happened in the case of genocide, with around 800,000 people dying in Rwanda alone in the 1990s. Many thousands also perished in Bosnia following the break up of the former Yugoslavia.
Although the Holocaust itself occurred only 70 years ago, ignorance about what was undoubtedly the biggest act of genocide in human history is today rife. Which is particularly galling for Poles, who bore the brunt of the Nazi onslaught and saw some of the worst atrocities committed on their territory.
It should therefore come as no surprise that they view the term “Polish concentration camp”, which has begun to appear in media in English-speaking counties in the last few years, as both insulting and a complete distortion of historical facts.
British-born Jan Niechwiadowicz has played a key role in tackling this distortion in his role as moderator of the Polish Media Issues (PMI) group. In its first six years, it has raised “637 major and 271minor issues” in relation to the term ‘Polish concentration camp’, and while “it is hard to judge success as it varies, in slightly above two-thirds of cases we have managed some form of success.”
Jan adds that, “my main tactic for dealing with ‘Polish concentration camp’ issues is to use quotes from experts, authors, Polish officials, Holocaust survivors and especially Jewish organisations.”
Commenting on specific countries, Jan says that Australia is a particular concern due to the failure rate of getting successful responses to complaints. However, the UK now looks likely to overtake the US as the biggest ‘offender’, which is surprising, given the fact that it is one-fifth its size in terms of population.
Jan cites the UK’s Daily Telegraph as having corrected usage of the term on multiple occasions, though this is probably down to the paper having “an understanding editor.”
While Polish embassies and organisations such as the Federation of Poles in Great Britain help out in tackling high-profile usage of the term, the PMI sees its role as also having to deal with minor issues such as blogs. In Jan’s view, these are just as important to address despite being less “sexy”.
As PMI’s membership has expanded, so the group has become better at uncovering usage of the term. This, coupled with an expansion in online media, account for a doubling of the issues it addressed from 2009/10 to 2010/11.
Even so, Jan believes that in the long-term the problem can only be tackled through education. And in one respect this is quite literally, as the term has even found its way into GCSE revision guides.
Indeed, one can argue that history is slowly but surely being rewritten, either deliberately or through ignorance, painting Poland as a guilty party in a war that was not of its own making and cost the lives of one in five of its population. As part of this process, there are now even instances of the Dachau concentration camp, which was located northwest of Munich in the German state of Bavaria, being referred to as in Poland.
Ultimately, “anti-Semitism, homophobia and others are not only against the law but socially unacceptable as well. Poles continue to be fair game and we need to make Polish sentiment just as unacceptable.”
September 5th, 2011 at 15:21
Chris, congratulations on an excellent article. The term “Polish concentration camps” is especially painfull to relations of Polish victims of those hell holes. My late mother was a survivor of Aushwitz and Ravensbruck, a Polish Catholic she cringed, as do I whenever seeing the term. Yhey were German concentration camps, some of which were situated in occupied Poland. Let us remember them for what they were and resist rewriting of history