NEWS from THE POLISH AMERICAN CONGRESS
HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION COMMITTEE
177 Kent St., Brooklyn, N.Y. 11222 - (718) 349-9689
____________ _________ _________ _________ _________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 1, 2007:

AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR:

"2006 WAS A YEAR OF HOLOCAUST FRAUDS"

From Michael Preisler's perspective, 2006 was a year when public
confidence in the accuracy of Holocaust history was visibly shaken.
What created the questions about its dependability was a long string of
reckless anti-Polish misrepresentations of historical facts. And those
who should be the guardians and defenders of the truth were the ones
most responsible for them.
Mr. Preisler is a Polish Catholic whose voice on this issue carries a
special credibility because he personally was a critical part of that
cruel history. He lived through most of it from inside Auschwitz
where he spent more than three years after Hitler's Gestapo arrested
him for his anti-Nazi activities during the German and Soviet
occupation of Poland.

Who's responsible for compromising this history? Preisler blames the
media as the main culprit. "Whenever they report about Poland and
the plight of the Polish people in World War II, they never get it right,"
he charges. "And it happens just too often for anyone to believe it's
unintentional. "

Preisler has every reason to be upset. For nearly thirty years he has
spoken publicly, particularly in schools, emphasizing the magnitude
of the Holocaust and how it ensnared him and the people of Poland.
He is co-founder of the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the
Polish American Congress whose objective is to preserve and promote
the truth of that history. His is a Christian voice authenticating the
reality of the Holocaust and challenging every anti-Semite who tries
to deny it ever took place.

Anti-Semitic deniers are not the only deniers who anger Preisler.
He points to what he describes as a "whole gang of anti-Polish and
anti-Christian deniers" who not only suppress the recorded history of
what the Christians of Poland suffered during the German terror
but often "blame the Polish people for crimes the Germans committed."
"They are so determined to trivialize the tragedy of the Polish Christians
and convince the American public not to waste any sympathy on them
that they often give the impression of being pro-Nazi or pro-Communist, "
he said.

One of Preisler's recurrent complaints is about the misleading way
newspapers and other publications write about the concentration camps
the Germans operated in Poland. Rather than referring to them as the
"German" or "Nazi" camps they were, the writers repeatedly insist on
calling them "Polish" concentration camps.
Such a confusing description often misleads the poorly informed and
unsuspecting reader to infer that the Poles, not the Germans, were the
murderers running these camps, according to Preisler who named leading
papers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as among
the repeat offenders.

Things got so bad in 2006 that the Polish government felt the need to
appeal to the United Nations and ask UNESCO to explicitly identify
Auschwitz as a German camp and put an end to the malicious implication
that the Poles were responsible for operating it.
"Even more ridiculous in 2006," Preisler noted, was a New Jersey paper
which referred to the German concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria
as a "Polish" camp. Preisler spent some time in Mauthausen after the
Nazis transferred him there from Auschwitz in the closing months of the war.

The paper later issued a correction after getting complaints from the
Polish American community. What irked Preisler most, however, was
when nobody else raised a voice to also object to such an obvious
misrepresentation.

"There are countless historians and scholars affiliated with Holocaust
museums and centers throughout America. None of them seemed
bothered by this outrageous violation of Holocaust integrity," he said.
One paper which rejected all appeals to correct an anti-Polish libel was
the Jewish World of Great Neck, N.Y. It misquoted an article in a
British publication and twisted it to sound as if the Nazi SS guards in
Auschwitz had been mostly Polish instead of German.

"There were no Polish SS guards in Auschwitz," said Preisler. He
warned the Jewish World such reckless and false accusations can only
give Holocaust deniers a good excuse "to claim that Holocaust testimony
is given by liars" and that the deniers are the ones telling the truth.
As someone who frequently speaks to school children about his
experiences in Auschwitz, he is careful to be honest and objective with
the facts. He clearly tells them that Jews were the largest group the
Nazis murdered in Auschwitz and Polish Christians were the second
largest.

"Truth - the whole truth - is an obligation for every Christian and for
every Jew who teaches about the Holocaust," is what Preisler firmly
believes.

Since the day he came to the United States more than fifty years ago,
Preisler says he has rarely seen Americans getting "the whole truth"
about Poland. If Americans knew that truth, he feels they would quickly
recognize and understand just how widespread is the current campaign
to falsify the history of the Holocaust in Poland.

What would he like Americans to know? Preisler enumerated several
basic facts. Above all, that Poland was the first to fight Hitler and the
Nazis and fought them longer than anyone else. That six million
Polish citizens were killed during the Holocaust - three million Polish
Jews and three million Polish Christians.

Also, that more Poles are honored at Israel's Yad Vashem for rescuing
Jews in the Holocaust than anyone else. That more Poles were killed
rescuing Jews than anyone else. And when everyone else was throwing
Jews out of their country in the Middle Ages, Poland welcomed these
Jews and gave them a safe haven which allowed their society, culture
and religion to flourish for the next eight hundred years until the Nazis
and the Communists invaded Poland in September, 1939.

When the concentration camps were liberated as the war ended, Preisler
sadly realized he could not return to his native Poland. Backed by a
Soviet army of occupation, the Communists had taken control and were
arresting and executing Polish patriots like him. The German reign of
terror in Poland was now replaced with one by the Communists.

It was no wonder that when the book, "Fear" came out in 2006, Preisler
took it as a new attempt to blame the Polish people for another crime
someone else committed, this time committed by the Communists in 1946.

Even worse, the same newspapers which delighted in exonerating the
Germans for operating the concentration camps expanded the story
and were now absolving the Communists of any guilt for what came
to be known as the Kielce pogrom.

What disturbs Preisler the most is to see American newspapers repeating
the false accusations the Communist terrorists leveled against the Polish
people sixty years ago. "They ignore existing authentic sources recorded
at the time of the event," and cited, as an example, the statements of the
U.S. ambassador to Poland who was there in 1946 and clearly refuted
the Communist claims.

"I never thought I would live to see such brazen manipulation of
Holocaust history as is going on today," says Preisler. "It seems the
time has come for each of us to ask the biblical question, what is truth?"
 

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