Row over Auschwitz name change
2006-04-23 08:31
Warsaw - A bid by Poland to change the official name of the Auschwitz death camp has sparked an international argument involving historians and Jewish groups over how the world should remember one of the greatest barbarities of the 20th century.
The Polish culture ministry in March asked Unesco to describe the Auschwitz camp as the "former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp" in the UN culture organisation's list of world heritage sites.
Unesco currently lists the site in southern Poland - where more than a million people were murdered by the Nazis during World War II - as the "Auschwitz Concentration Camp."
A change of name would attribute the camp "in a precise manner to the German Nazi regime," which occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945, said deputy culture minister Tomasz Merta.
Warsaw's move was prompted by its concerns at increasingly frequent foreign media reports that described former concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek run by the Nazis in Poland during World War II as "Polish" death camps.
Even respected publications such as the New York Times and Germany's Der Spiegel weekly referred to the camps in this way.
Simmering controversy
Warsaw's efforts towards what it sees as setting the record straight have provoked a simmering controversy.
Maram Stern, Deputy Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, accused Poland of trying to rewrite history and claimed that the Auschwitz camp was built by local Polish workers.
Stern's assertion was dismissed by historians. Several Jewish organisations, such as the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, and Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust museum, voiced support for the Polish name-change initiative.
However, Israel Gutman, Yad Vashem's chief historian, said the name proposed by Warsaw "does not fully convey what really happened in this place."
"I appeal to the Polish government ... that the phrase 'site of the mass murder of Jews' be inserted into the camp's name. The full historical truth cannot be concealed," he wrote in a column for Poland's Dziennik newspaper Friday.
Gutman's proposal was immediately attacked by eminent Polish historian Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz prisoner.
"Such a name would demand an additional commentary, because the version proposed by Gutman is not completely true," said Bartoszewski, a former foreign minister who was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance.
"Not only Jews were killed in Auschwitz; 22,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners and 80,000 Polish Christians died there as well. It's not possible to include these dramatic statistics in one, short name," Bartoszewski added.
The camp was set up by the Nazis on the site of a former Polish army barracks on the outskirts of the southern Polish town of Oswiecim - Auschwitz in German.
The camp was expanded later to the nearby village of Birkenau. At least 1.1 million men, women and children perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. Most of them were among the six million European Jews exterminated in the Nazis' "Final Solution."
Bartoszewski said he was generally in favour of the Polish government's attempt to change the way UNESCO lists the camp's name.
"It's a good proposal because it does not allow what happened on Polish territory during World War II to be forgotten," he added.
However, Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising by Jews against the Nazis, believes the notion of changing Auschwitz's official name is "absurd".
"The only thing it does is to cause conflicts and disputes that should not exist," he said.
- SAPA