"Dirty tricks"

“If it’s true one picture can be worth a thousand words, then this picture is worth a thousand lies.”  That’s the way Detroit’s Polish American community feels about the above photo the Detroit Free Press published suggesting Poland, not Germany, murdered three million Jews. Despite a flood of protests from its readers, the paper continues to feature the picture on its website.

New York, N.Y. … Repeated attempts to confuse and deceive the public into thinking Poland, instead of Germany, was guilty for the Holocaust are casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over the accuracy of Holocaust history, according to Auschwitz survivor Michael Preisler.

A Polish Catholic who spent more than three years as a prisoner of Hitler’s SS in Auschwitz, Preisler says he is “shocked and disgusted” with current devious efforts to whitewash the bloody record of the Nazis and shift the blame to Poles like him. He calls them a shameful campaign to change the truth.

The latest incident causing his dismay is a misleading photo published in the Detroit Free Press implying Poland, not Germany, murdered more than three million Polish Jews.

Members of Detroit’s Polish American community brought it to his attention after the newspaper rejected all their protests. Preisler is co-chair of the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the Polish American Congress which acts as watchdog against Holocaust misrepresentations.

The picture was taken at a local Holocaust center and shows a Jewish Holocaust survivor standing next to an exhibit allowing only a small section of the exhibit to be seen. That section accusingly displays the words, “Poland Murdered: 3,001,000.”

An angry Preisler denounces it as “another Holocaust fraud.” The odd shape of the photo suggests to him that half of it had been cut away. What is left leaves the wrong impression that Poland is being condemned for these murders.

“The words remaining in the picture are out of context and misleading. It’s a disgrace for the Free Press to make it look like the Nazis are innocent of these Holocaust crimes,” he said.

“If it’s true one picture can be worth a thousand words, then this picture is worth a thousand lies,” he added, warning the editors that “a half-truth is just as bad as a whole lie.” That three million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust is a matter of record, according to Preisler. “But the other half of the half-truth is that three million Polish Christians also died alongside those Jews. Altogether, six million citizens of Poland were murdered during that terrible time,” he said.

The doctored photo is a good example of the kind of harassments Christians, “specifically the Catholics of Poland, have been experiencing in various media. It not only denies Poland’s tragedy but it also insinuates that we did the killing and not the Germans.”

While Preisler considers this matter “shameful,” the Free Press apparently feels no such shame. Not content with giving the picture only a one-shot exposure in a print edition, the editors are extending its lifetime by featuring it on their website.

“I never thought I’d see so much dishonesty about the Holocaust as now. The credibility of Holocaust history is disintegrating right before our eyes and there just aren’t enough of us who lived through it still around to say something about the dirty tricks,” he said.

Frank Milewski