Courtney McGrailDear Editor, I must confess myself baffled by last week’s letter from Chris Jezewski headed “Auschwitz camp was not ‘in Poland’” (IC 22/09/2016).
Mr Jezewski argues that Auschwitz was not “in Poland” since Poland was occupied during the period when the camp was engaged in its murderous work. Indeed, in stressing that the area around Auschwitz was annexed by the Third Reich, he seems to be arguing that there was no Poland at time in which events could have taken place.
In a pettifogging sense this is not entirely inaccurate, but it rather ignores the existence throughout the Second World War of the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile, which never accepted that Poland had ceased to exist. This government-in-exile was seen by most countries throughout the war as Poland’s legitimate government, and many thousands of Poland’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen served heroically through the war under the flag of Poland.
More broadly, the suggestion that events did not take place in Poland because Poland was then subject to militarily-imposed foreign rule seems a ludicrous one.
Would anybody ever seriously try to correct articles about the Famine by saying “the Famine did not take place in Ireland, but in British-occupied Ireland, because at the time Ireland was part of the United Kingdom”?
In truth, even that seems less silly than Mr Jezewski’s suggestion, since there are people – not least in Britain – who tend to forget that the Famine was the single biggest catastrophe ever to effect the UK.
It is hard to imagine that there can be anyone who reads The Irish Catholic who is unaware that the concentration camps, of which Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most famous, were the creation of Germany’s Nazis.
Yours etc.,
Gabriel Kelly,
Drogheda, Co. Louth.