WARSAW - President Obama has written a letter to the Polish president expressing “regret’’ for an inadvertent verbal gaffe that caused controversy in Poland this week.
On Tuesday, Obama used the expression “a Polish death camp’’ while honoring a Polish World War II resistance hero rather than wording that would have made clear that he meant a death camp that Nazi Germany ran on Polish soil during its wartime occupation of Poland.
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All that may be, but I know secondhand from many Holocaust survivors that the Poles, with their Nazi collaboration, their standing idly by, their turning in of neighbors to the SS, and their vicious postwar treatment levied against returning Jews (those few who managed to remain there due to it), they were no angels toward the Jews either. Lest this article mislead in the opposite direction.
Of course, not all Poles behaved in this manner toward the Jews. (Some survivors were hidden by kindly Polish farmers, and there was a large Polish resistance movement.) But the survivors I know say that they suffered under Polish treatment both during and after the war.