Statement from Ambassador of Poland in Washington, DC regarding comments made by President of the Anti-Defamation League

In recent days several media outlets including CNN and The Washington Post have published comments attributed to Mr. Jonathan Greenblatt, President of the Anti-Defamation League, which state that Poland refuses to publically acknowledge Hitler's attempt to exterminate Jews. Such statements are not only false but hurtful to the Polish people. 

The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of European Jewry carried out by Nazi Germany. Poland recognized this long before other nations, or even before the term Holocaust was widely used. 

In 1942 the Polish government in exile, in a note addressed to the governments of the United Nations, declared:  “The new methods of mass slaughter applied during the last few months confirm the fact that the German authorities aim with systematic deliberation at the total extermination of the Jewish population of Poland…”

To this day Poland continues to commemorate the tragedy of the Holocaust. Most recently, Undersecretary of State in the Presidential Chancery Mr. Wojciech Kolarski stated last week during International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations, “Here, in Auschwitz, Germans carried out the mass murder of Jews from Poland and other occupied European states, as well as Poles, Russians and Roma… The German’s goal was the total extermination of the Jewish nation and the enslavement and exploitation of the Slavs.” 

Earlier in January, while in Israel, President Andrzej Duda visited the Yad Vashem Institute, where he declared, “Yad Vashem displays the entire tragedy of the Jewish nation; the Holocaust in the fullest meaning of this word, and the brutality displayed by Nazi Germans as they tried to carry out the destruction of the Jewish nation.” 

In Washington, DC our Embassy annually participates in Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, paying tribute to the murdered Jews of Europe, which include three million Polish citizens.

These statements and actions disprove Mr. Greenblatt’s unfounded insinuation. I firmly request that they be withdrawn.

Embassy of the Republic of Poland
in Washington D.C.