New York Times Attacks Glemp In Obit
- PostEagle
- February 1, 2013
- Uncategorized
- 0 Comments
Letters To The Editor
New York Times
Editor
Re: Cardinal Glemp obituary – January 24
Shame on you for using an obituary to attack Cardinal Glemp, making multiple references to accusations of anti-Semitism, without identifying the accusers, nor checking the facts.
Germany occupied Poland and killed about 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Polish Catholics. About one million (not “millions”) Jews and about 100,000 Polish Catholics were killed in Auschwitz. It is the largest Jewish, and Catholic, cemetery in the world. The Carmelite convent was not in Auschwitz but next to it. The Sisters prayed for all of the victims.
Radio Maryja is certainly not anti-Semitic and saying that Father Rydzyk “mingled daily outpourings of hate with prayer,” is preposterous.
Your assertion that Poles killed 1600 Jews in Jedwabne is unsupported. The investigation and exhumation of the bodies were stopped because of rabbinical objections. German shells were found in the barn — the Poles had no weapons. Poles who refused to help would have been shot.
Roman J. Zawadzki
Vice-Chair
Polish American Defense Committee
PO Box 642791
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(The writer is from a Polish Catholic family which lost three cousins in Auschwitz.)
Sources:
www.cde.ca.gov/ci/hs/im/documents/modelcurrichrgenoc.pdf (p. 53)
www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom
REQUEST FOR CORRECTIONS
Phrases in Question
from article “Cardinal Jozef Glemp of Poland Is Dead At 83”
Date Published: January 24, 2013
Web or Print: both
1. “agreement to move a Carmelite convent from Auschwitz,” should say “from the vicinity of Auschwitz,” — the convent was not on the grounds of the camp.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/15/world/pope-orders-nuns-out-of-auschwitz.html
“Many Jews view the red brick convent just outside the barbed wire perimeter at Auschwitz…”
2. “Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were killed,” should say, “about one million.”
See: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleld=10005189
“In total, approximately 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz.”
[ . . . ]
“At least 960,000 Jews were killed in Auschwitz.”
3. “the 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews, most of them burned alive in a barn by Polish neighbors,” should say “of 300-400 Jews, most of them burned in a barn by Poles under the guns of the Germans.”
See: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleld=10005183
“Polish residents of Jedwabne, a small town located in Bialystok District of first Soviet-occupied and then German-occupied Poland, participated in the murder of hundreds of their Jewish neighbors. Although responsibility for instigating this “pogrom” has not been fully established, scholars have documented at least a German police presence in the town at the time of the killings.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom
“A group of Jewish men were forced by the Nazis to demolish a statue of Lenin that had been put up earlier by the Soviets (as in Kolno), and then carry it out of town while singing Soviet songs. The local rabbi was forced to lead this procession of about 40 people. The group was taken to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of the monument, while most of the remaining Jews, estimated at around 250 to 300 (IPN final findings), including many women and children, were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene from the former Soviet supplies (or German gasoline, by different accounts) in the presence of eight German gendarmes, who shot those who tried to escape.”
[ . . . ]
“At least 340 Jewish victims were killed in the pogrom, in two groups of which the first contained 40 to 50 people, and the second group contained about 300. The exact number of victims could not be determined. The figure of 1,600 or so victims (cited in ‘Neighbors’) was ‘highly unlikely, and was not confirmed in the course of the investigation.’ ”