False insinuations about Poland and its treatment of the Jews

The headline is not justified by the factually inaccurate opinion of your correspondent.

The Kielce incident happened during the post-war Soviet occupation. Historians generally agree that it was stage managed by the Soviet Union.

Using a photo of Auschwitz to accompany your headline is considered ‘Holocaust Denial and Distortion’.

Specifically: an attempt “to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups”.

To quote from a UNESCO report: “The historical record is absolutely clear: there was no Polish participation in the German death camp enterprise, and the camps themselves were set up on occupied Polish territory simply because it was where most of the Jews to be murdered were living.”

After the war supposedly ended, only Jews were allowed to leave communist occupied Poland.

Many did because of Zionist beliefs; because they did not want to live under the totalitarian Soviet regime and to distance themselves from the land where their families had been killed by the Germans.

More Poles are acknowledged as Righteous by Yad Vashem than people from any other country.

The numbers are an understatement since only in German occupied Poland was there a death penalty for any person helping Jews.

It is estimated up to 50,000 Poles were executed for providing such assistance.

Before the war, 10% of the Polish population was Jewish.

For hundreds of years Poland was the centre of the Jewish world.

A few years ago, David Cesarani publically admonished Stephen Fry for making a similar error to what News Letter corrected.

The last paragraphs from Mr O’Cathail are absurd in their malicious insinuation.

It is doubly ironic that around Holocaust Memorial Day, News Letter seems to have forgotten the sectarian history of Belfast and instead allowed false and misleading insinuations to be made about Poland.

Why not write about the IRA trying to make deals with Nazis or the “morally bankrupt” government of Ireland during those years with Eamon de Valera signing the book of condolence for Hitler!

Chris Jezewski, Stroud