ࡱ> RTQ'`@Bbjbj.Dr r r r r r r  T  & %%%%%%%$'h?*p%-r  %r r %.r r %%rRr r @" l.a #j!t% %0&!V*"*@"@"*r 8$< rKS' %%. &  r r r r r r  Intervention by WBadysBaw Bartoszewski, the Polish Secretary of State, at the special session  Caring for Victims of Nazism and Their Legacy Holocaust Era Assets Conference, Prague 26-30 June 2009 Ladies and Gentlemen, Thank you for kindly inviting me to this conference and for granting me the opportunity to open the session devoted to caring for the victims of Nazism and for their legacy. This topic is very important to me, as it affects me personally. I am standing before you not just as a historian, but even more crucially as a witness and a participant of the most tragic events in the history of Europe and of my own life. I have never denied that my subsequent way through life was shaped by experiences of an eighteen-years old man who became an Auschwitz prisoner in 1940 and experienced the infernal evil in its pure form, against which he was utterly helpless. When I managed to get out of Auschwitz, I took it as my duty to, first of all, help people avoid a similar fate and, second of all, to maintain and spread the truth about what I had been through and what I had witnessed, regardless of the consequences. For this reason, when the war ended I devoted myself to documentarian, historian and opinion journalist work under the Commission for the Prosecution of German's Crimes in Poland. At the time, the topic of Nazi Germanys crimes was very much alive among thousands of former prisoners of concentration camps who survived in Poland. There were tens of thousands Polish and Christian, as well as other victims of Hitlers racist policies. While the Polish society was aware of Jewish losses this awareness was being denied and masked in various ways under the Communist regime. One must remember that we did not live in a democracy with its free press and education system. I myself spent six and a half years in Stalin-era prisons, including the most bitter experience of sharing cells along the same corridor with Rudolf Hss, the former commander of Auschwitz-Birkenau, during his trial in Warsaw. I am not talking about it to present my personal story as a particularly tragic one. No, this kind of experience was shared by many Poles, former prisoners of Nazi camps, members of the Polish underground Armia Krajowa, or by people who gave assistance to Jews. What I intend to achieve is to make you realise that in many ways the Second World War in Poland looked quite different than in Western Europe. Poles fell victims of not just the Third Reich, but also of the Soviet Union. After the war, Poland lost its sovereignty. A Communist regime was established. Not long after I had met Rudolf Hss, they jailed in the very same Warsaw prison an officer by the name of Witold Pilecki who had deliberately let himself be caught by the Germans and who was brought to Auschwitz on the same train as myself in September 1940. At the camp he became the main organiser of resistance. In 1948, Witold Pilecki was pronounced enemy of the Peoples Poland and murdered with a shot in the back of his head. Despite the aim of the conference to look particularly carefully at victims of the Holocaust I see it as my duty to remind the distinguished forum that in Poland the terms Nazi victims and victims of the Holocaust do not mean the same thing. Indeed, the German Nazi regime pursued, from autumn of 1939, a consistent extermination campaign against Polish intellectual and political elites. In no other country but Poland did the Germans also murder two and a half thousand priests and nuns. For this reason Poles have a right to demand that remembrance should also include these horrible events. The topic will be discussed later on by Dr. Kazimierz Wycicki from the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression, a Polish authority responsible for caring for the victims of the Third Reich and of the Stalins Soviet Union. For this reason I will refrain myself from going into details of this aspect. Nor do I want to give you a detail account of a Polish system of care for the victims of the two totalitarian systems. I am not a specialist in this field and I perceive my role here differently. To me the care for the Nazi victims means not just providing for their material needs, ensuring conditions of life in dignity and offering social care. The care I am thinking about is expressed in a care for their legacy and in continuously doing our homework in a history lesson that stems from their suffering. I titled my intervention Remembrance and Responsibility because to me these are two key terms when talking about Nazi victims and about their legacy. Remembrance is particularly important today, when the generation of witnesses to the genocide is passing away, when certain people, including some leading state-level politicians, deny the numbers of victims and put in doubt the very existence of the Holocaust, the gas chambers and the crematoria. I will venture an opinion that we Poles are particularly sensitive to what is known as the Auschwitz lie. Denying the Holocaust and the entire Nazi system is an insult for millions of Christians around the world, for whom Edith Stein and Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, murdered in Auschwitz, are saints. This is also an insult for hundreds of thousands of Poles, whose relatives were murdered or died in concentration and death camps. Dear ladies and gentlemen, the German Third Reich created a whole system of death camps. But it is Auschwitz-Birkenau that has become the symbol of the Holocaust. For this reason let me say a few words about the Polish initiative to save this Commemoration Site, Polands and Europes largest cemetery without graves, of which Poland has been taking a very tender care for decades. Sadly, this place is at risk. Built on a marshy ground with the hands of exhausted prisoners their provisional huts are struggling to stand the test of time. For these ruins and buildings the time is passing ever faster and if we fail to find a permanent source of finance for a global conservation plan a natural erosion and deterioration processes will only accelerate. Conservators will also face the task of preserving countless items belonging to the murdered prisoners. This is an extraordinary scientific and financial challenge. Indeed, no education curriculum teaches how to preserve human hair or prosthetics left by the murdered. We all need this Place, one inscribed in the UNESCO register. It is here that you can find the fullest understanding of the drama of a Europe engulfed by war and hatred. It is here that young generations can best understand how much there is to protect today to make future look completely different. The place where one can measure up to the most important questions about man, about society, about anti-Semitism, about racial hatred and about contempt to the fellow human being. The generation of those who survived Auschwitz is passing away. In a few years, perhaps in less than twenty years, the last of those who survived as children will be gone. This year, I established a international Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation so that future generation of visitors to the remains of the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz can continue seeing with their own eyes the genuine place of murders perpetrated during the Second World War. The foundation will raise funds for a core Perpetual Fund. The fund will be invested and the interest on this investment will be spent on a long-term conservation plan. The initiative has already received support of the Donald Tusks government and a favourable reception from several national leaders, including first and foremost of Germany. Very few of them, however, have committed concrete amounts. I would like to encourage all of you, ladies and gentlemen, to take every step to save Auschwitz-Birkenau. This will be an expression of our remembrance of the victims and our responsibility for theirs and our heritage.  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