Remembering Poland’s history

This year the world commemorates the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. This year it is important to remember and not forget.

Poland was the only country to fight Nazi Germany from the very first to the last day of this greatest armed conflict in history. The war began with the attack on Poland: first by Nazi Germans and soon by the Soviet Union. Despite the defeat suffered in 1939, Poland refused to co-operate with Hitler. Poles formed armed resistance in occupied Poland and armies abroad, which were the fourth-largest allied force at the end of the war.

That is why the expression “Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland” used by Susan Schwartz in her article “Holocaust survivor cycles road he walked 70 years ago from Auschwitz to Krakow” published in the Montreal Gazette on July 19, 2015, was neither geographically nor historically correct. Although the author described well Marcel Zielinski’s experience of his exhausting walk for life, the publication stirred some Gazette readers as the Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (name recognized by UN) was misnamed, distorting the true historical picture.

It was Germany’s occupation of Poland that led to Hitler’s decision to locate the German concentration and death camps on occupied Polish soil and Poles were among the first inmates of these camps. Before the war, Poland was home for the biggest number of European Jews, who have been living in my country for almost a millennium, often during times of persecution elsewhere. During WWII, unlike many European countries, Poland was never an ally of Germany and never had a collaborative regime. Poland lost during the war almost 6 million of its citizens, 3 million of them Polish Jews.

The history of anti-Semitism in Poland — before, during and after the war — is a subject of frank, sometimes painful historical debate in my country. But in a world of moral collapse there were those thousands of Poles, people of great courage, who upheld human values. I am honoured to represent a country whose citizens constitute the largest national group within the Righteous Among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem — 6,532 of individuals of Polish origin were awarded the title even though out of the entire German-occupied Europe it was only in occupied Poland that the German military had orders to immediately shoot any Polish citizen caught helping Jews, along with the family of the caught rescuer.

Today, one million Polish descendants, who can be proud of the Polish history, call Canada home. Marcin Bosacki, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Canada, Ottawa