Free for All
Saturday, June 20, 2009

Blaming 'Ordinary Poles'

In his June 16 column ["Where Anti-Semitism is Mainstream"] on the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard Cohen said this of President Obama's visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp:
"But I would have preferred for the president to have gone to Kielce, the Polish city where 42 Jews were murdered after an allegation of a blood libel . . . by ordinary Poles."

The horrific Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, was not the responsibility of ordinary Poles, but largely of the soldiers and police officers of the new communist-dominated government. Those were not ordinary times but a period of virtual civil war in Poland as communist rule was imposed on an unwilling populace.

I would prefer for Mr. Cohen to visit the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where more Poles than any other nationality are honored for saving Jews from Nazi genocide.

-- Charles Chotkowski
Fairfield, Conn.

The writer is research director for the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the Polish American Congress.