BERLIN. A confrontation has opened between the board of the Auschwitz Museum and the majority Polish national-conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedlywosc (Law and Justice, PiS, led by historical leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki). According to reports from Gazeta Wyborcza and the independent news site NotesfromPoland (Nfp), three of the nine members of the board, therefore a third of the management of the Museum, a state-owned but independent institution, have submitted their resignation disagreeing with the appointment on the board of Beata Szydlo, former prime minister and currently one of the influential vice presidents of the PiS.
The decision to include former Prime Minister Szydlo, who said she was “happy and honored, since I too was born in Oswiecim where the German Nazi death camp was built”, was taken by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Piotr Glinski. The reaction of the three resigned was immediate. First of all Stanislaw Krajewski high exponent of the Polish Jewish community and professor at the University of Warsaw. “I am leaving the post because I fear a politicization of the Museum, while Memory is not divisible, it is everyone’s heritage. I understand Szydlo’s appointment, but I believe that such a board will not work”.
Marek Lasota, former director of the Museo dell´Armia Krajowa (the underground Polish resistance army and manager of the underground state under the German Nazi and Soviet Bolshevik occupation) and the former director of the museum of Auschwitz, Krystyna Oleksy.
The history of Auschwitz is indisputable: in spite of the many in the world who, insulting the Memory and the Polish laws, wrongly call it “Polish camp” Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2-Birkenau were the largest and most atrocious complex of the genocide machine created by the Nazi Germany everywhere, on its territory and in occupied Europe, by the will of Hitler, the Nsdap and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”, that is the Shoah, decided by the German Nazis in the infamous secret conference in 1942 in a villa on Lake Wannsee in the southwestern residential outskirts of Berlin. In Auschwitz the dead, well over one million, were 91 per cent Jews from all over Europe, 6 per cent Poles. Poland attacked and divided in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the USSR was suppressed by two totalitarianisms as a state. It existed as a clandestine state precisely with the Armia Krajowa (AK), with the government in exile in London and with the legendary Polish Army of General Wladyslaw Anders who deployed he was in the allied coalition more soldiers, airplanes and weapons than de Gaulle’s “Free France”, he played a decisive part in the first Axis defeat (the air battle of England), crushed the Wehrmacht in Montecassino, opening the Fifth Army of Mark Clark the away to Rome, and freed among others Bologna and Ancona. Special agents of AK and Anders, infiltrating various camps, were the first to document in the world that the Holocaust was underway. From 1945 many AK heroes were hanged by the new Soviet occupiers.
The problem highlighted by Professor Krajewski and the Polish and international Jewish communities – and the former Polish ambassador to Israel Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska – is the attempt by the current majority government to “rewrite and polonize history”. For example, by giving greater importance in memory to the Polish victims of the German Nazi death camps. A recent poll indicated that well over half of Poles view the horrid German Nazi concentration camp as the first place for the martyrdom of the Polish nation, and only 43 percent as the primary site of the Holocaust.
.