Historical inaccuracy
October 5, 2023
Carol Glatz’s article “Jesuit letter revealing Nazi atrocities discovered” in the Sept. 24 Catholic Register contains inaccurate, not to mention hurtful connotations.
Glatz refers to Nazi death camps in Poland as “Polish concentration camps.” I refer Glatz to the work of one of the most outstanding persons in the field of Holocaust studies, Władysław Bartoszewski. A witness to the horrors of the Nazi occupation, Bartoszewski worked tirelessly to clear any insinuation that what happened in Nazi-occupied Poland was in any way a Polish plan to destroy human life as the Nazis had done.
Such casual oversights and insinuations remain extremely offensive to anyone of Polish descent who has researched and understands the complexities involved with the Polish experience during the war. We simply cannot make these old, obviously uneducated insinuations when realities are understood very differently now on such highly sensitive and complicated issues like the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Alexander J. Opalinski
Mactier, Ont.
(Alas, journalism can be history in a hurry – the Editor.)