Auschwitz museum says 'damage done' by New Yorker article

The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum said Monday that damage was done by a New Yorker article that explores efforts to stifle Holocaust scholarship in Poland, a piece the museum had originally accused of containing lies about Poland's role during World War II. Auschwitz museum director Piotr Cywinski welcomed the editing changes, but he said in a statement to The Associated Press that he felt that since “painful damage has been done, an apology should follow the correction.” The government also reacted on the weekend, with a deputy foreign minister, Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek, saying “this manipulation will be the subject of a strong reaction from Polish diplomacy.” The Auschwitz museum is located in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the war. The key point of contention involved the original subheading, which said: “To exonerate the nation of the murders of three million Jews, the Polish government will go as far as to prosecute scholars for defamation.” Some 3 million Polish Jews were killed during the Holocaust, but the vast majority were directly murdered by Adolf Hitler’s occupying Nazi forces in Poland. The original passages was amended to say: “Scholars face defamation suits, and potential criminal charges, in the Polish government’s effort to exonerate the nation of any role in the murders of three million Jews during the Nazi occupation.” A New Yorker spokesperson said the magazine changed the subheading “to more accurately reflect the contents of the article, which we stand by.” Earlier Gessen had sent a statement to a Polish newspaper saying they had gotten hate mail and death threats over the article. David Harris, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, said Sunday that the article's original subtitle was “defamatory.” “Germany — and Germany alone — was responsible for the Nazi death camps, from Auschwitz to Treblinka,” Harris wrote on Twitter, adding that “the infamous words at Auschwitz — ‘Arbeit macht frei’ — were written in German, not Polish.