A Letter to President Obama from the Piast Institute

May 30, 2012

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

The ten million members of the Polish community in the United States were elated when it was announced that Jan Karski was to receive posthumously the Medal of Freedom. I knew Professor Karski and once had the great good fortune to spend seven days traveling with him on a tour of college campuses, which I had arranged for him. He, like Irena Sendler, who organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, is a courageous and selfless hero whose life and deeds in the best and most generous traditions of Polish faith and culture lit the darkness that enveloped Europe in one of the bleakest periods of human history. Few in our time have deserved the honor more than Jan Karski.

However, the event was marred by the reference, in your otherwise generous remarks, to “Polish Death Camps.” You were indeed ill served by whomever wrote those ugly and libelous words for you. I am sure the reference froze and horrified the audience as well as the many who watched it on C-Span, as I did. The outrage in the Polish Press and by the Polish government this morning speaks to how painful those words are to Poles everywhere.

The Polish community in the U.S. as well as the Polish government has fought against this usage for years. After several months of exchanges and demands last summer the Piast Institute finally got YAHOO Inc., which reaches 3.45 million people each month, to proscribe its use and to codify that ban in its usage manuals and protocols. Thanks to the complaints of the Polish community led by the Kosciuszko Foundation which presented a petition signed by well over 300,000 persons including Nobel Prize winners and other notables such as the President of Poland, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the New York Times banned its use. Local efforts have resulted in similar assurances that the term will not be used from newspapers such as the Detroit Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The suggestion that the Polish Nation was Hitler’s ally in the Holocaust or even its author is a falsehood which has no support in the voluminous historical record on World War II in Poland. The Nazi camps in Poland were built by Germans. Poles played no role in establishing or operating them. In fact, Christian Poles as well as Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Europe were the victims of Nazi torture and murder in those camps. It was a shared martyrdom. I am sure that you will receive many other letters that will detail at greater length Poland’s historical record of toleration and commitment to freedom and its tragic yet luminous record in World War II that there is no need for me to rehearse it here.

The gaffe in your speech requires an apology. It also presents an ideal opportunity to denounce not just that ugly lie but also the destructive force of all such false stereotypes, which warp and poison our public dialog. It is a rare public teaching moment and the Presidential office offers a bully pulpit to address it. Moreover, given the occasion, it is a chance to advance the cause for which Jan Karski so generously and courageously repeatedly endangered his life. There could be no better tribute to this great man.

The Piast Institute, as a National Research Center on Polish and Polish American Affairs, stands ready to join with you in this cause.

Sincerely yours,
Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, Ph.D.
President