THE ECONOMISTS: FEW things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase “Polish death camps” as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder.
Unfortunately this seems to have escaped Barack Obama’s staff. In what was meant to be an encomium for the heroic wartime work of Jan Karski,a Polish resistance hero who vainly tried to alert the world to the Holocaust, Mr Obama (presumably accidentally) let slip the phrase “Polish death camp”.
Even in the middle of the night, the reaction in Warsaw was incendiary. Poland wants Mr Obama to apologise to prime minister Donald Tusk. … (more)
EDITOR: No country was more collaborative with the Nazis in persecuting and exterminating their Jewish population than Poland. It is time they come to grip with their own history.
