Letter to Yahoo About "Polish Death Camps"

May 23, 2011

Ms. Carol Bartz, CEO
Yahoo Inc.
701 First Ave.
Sunny Vale, CA  94089


Dear Ms. Bartz,

I am writing to register a complaint on behalf of the Piast Institute and the Polish American Community about the use of the term “Polish Death Camp” in a Yahoo sub-headline on May 12, 2011 introducing an article announcing the conviction by a German court of John Demjanuk, a Ukrainian-American from Cleveland who had been a guard at the Nazi Death Camp at Sobibor. He was charged with being an accessory of being an accessory to the death of almost 28,000 Jews.  I hope you do not treat my complaint as merely an expression of a parochial and eccentric ethnic sensibility but a request that Yahoo tell honestly and fully the history of one of the defining events of the last century and one of its most heinous crimes.

I need not belabor the point that during the Second World War Germany built most of its concentration camps and all of its death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.  During the first two years of the occupation, the vast majority of the victims at the camps were Poles as the Germans carried out the systematic destruction of the professional, academic, artistic and religious leadership of the Polish Nation as well as anyone else who resisted.  By 1942, the camps became the site of the even more terrible genocide perpetuated against Polish and Foreign Jews.  Needless to say the Poles did not conceive, build or staff the camps.  They, like their Jewish neighbors, were its victims.

To identify these places as “Polish Death Camps” is unconscionable.  A simple search on Yahoo’s own search engine yields numerous articles protesting such usage including the story on an international petition, with over 100,000 signatures circulated by the Koscuiszko Foundation, demanding that the New York Times cease using the term. The leadership of the Jewish Community in the United States has joined with the Polish American Community and many other fair minded people in condemning this usage as inaccurate and defamatory.  As the former National Co-Chair of the Polish American-Jewish American Committee, I speak from personal knowledge of the strong opposition of our Jewish Colleagues to the term as distorting the History of the Holocaust.

The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have all agreed to ban the term from their style books.  Recently, the Executive Editor of the Detroit Free Press assured me that his newspaper will not use the term.  I ask Yahoo to join with these and other distinguished news media to ban the use of the term on Yahoo.  It would be an important service to your readers who look to you for accuracy and fairness, and a major step in assuring that the truth be told about the Era which continues to haunt our consciousness two generations later.

If there are any questions please feel free to write or call.  I send along with this letter my study “Ideology and Persecution:  Nazi Ideology and the Gentile Victims of Nazism” Prepared for the National Catholic Holocaust Education Center at Seton Hill College which treats the issues I have touched on in my letter.

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