5/28/2004 - TO: The National Polish American Jewish American Council.
As someone who participated in meetings of your predecessor organization over twenty years ago, I felt compelled to submit some of my thoughts on use of the term Holocaust.
When I was in Poland, the Gestapo arrested me and sent me to Auschwitz in October, 1941 when most of the prisoners there were Polish Catholics like me. I remained there until the Germans vacated the camp in January, 1945 and forced us on the death march in which many of the prisoners
perished. I was later liberated by the U.S. Army in May of that year. The letter announcing your conference stated your deliberations on the Polish and Jewish experience will strive to find some way of “distinguishing it from the unique targeting of the Jewish people for extermination by the
Nazis. would much prefer you seek a way to identify and emphasize how much alike were the experiences of Jews and Poles rather than laboring in search to try and uncover any possibility of a difference. Yes, the tragedy of the Jewish people is unique. But so is that of the Polish people. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum acknowledges as much by inscribing the order Adolf Hitler gave his generals on the wall at the entrance
to the Poland exhibit … send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only then shall we gain the living space (lebensraum) we need. Jews and Poles both occupied the territory that Hitler so coveted. To get rid of us and make room for his superior German population, he began killing us from the very first day of his invasion. I vividly remember how the Luftwaffe began his bloodthirsty orgy with the deliberate strafing of innocent civilians
with whom I was walking regardless which of us were Jews and which of us were Poles. He intended to eventually dispose of six million Jews. His intentions for the Polish people were not much different except there were 25 million of us on the land he wanted so much for the German people. Disposing of us, in whatever way it took, would have to be slower and last longer. I can only thank God time ran out for him with his defeat in 1945. In Auschwitz, the SS guards made little distinction between Jews and Poles. To them, we both were untermenschen or subhuman. We wore the same
striped prison garb. We slept together in the same barracks. We ate the same rations. We stood together at roll calls. We worked the same detail. We endured the same physical beatings and the same kind of verbal abuse the guards gave us. Each of us faced the threat of instant execution at any
time. We all were available specimens for experimentation by German doctors. And the smoke from the chimney of the crematorium never disclosed if it came from a Jew or a Pole. Unless the history of the Holocaust recognizes the shared ordeal Jews and Poles experienced together, I am deeply concerned it encourages dangerous misconceptions and damaging conclusions about the Polish people. I am astounded that so many Jews have told me they never knew there were Polish Catholics like me in Auschwitz. Many of them held a disturbing sense of hostility to Polish people because they had always believed us to be nothing more than bystanders and onlookers completely unaffected by the atrocities the Germans committed. While I did not look
for their sympathy, I never expected them to be so misinformed. To say that we Poles do not belong as part of the Holocaust, can only
continue, even reinforce, the unjustified prejudice I so frequently encountered from those who have a limited or erroneous understanding of the Jewish and Polish catastrophe. (Signed) Michael Preisler
Auschwitz No. 22213
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