ARBEIT MACHT FREI
MIROSŁAW PIOTROWSKI
We have already celebrated the 70th anniversary of entering Auschwitz by the Red Army, seen as liberation of the biggest German labour and death camp in Europe. Above the entrance gate of this cruel factory of death, there is still the inscription ‘Arbeit mach frei’ (Work makes free). According to official data, during nearly five years, about a million and one hundred thousand people, including the biggest number of Jews, as well as Poles, Romas and others, were killed there. This camp was a real effect of the consciously established German plan of extermination of people during the second world war. The Germans created the whole net of concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) and extermination camps (Vernichtungslager). Most prisoners were experiencing a hell there. The anniversary reflection on the killing machine organization and the gehenna of killed people were shadowed by media games. They were an element of the policy and historic pseudo-policy pursued by particular countries. Wanting to appreciate and support the Ukrainians fighting with Russia in Donbas, the Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna discovered that the camp in Auschwitz had been liberated by the Ukrainians. The Russian party, whose president Wladimir Putin was not invited to the ceremony, reacted extremely nervously. The chief of the Foreign Ministry called the statement of the Polish minister as ‘blasphemous and cynical’, and in Polish mass media there was a percentage enumeration of participation of the Ukrainians and the Russians in the ranks of the First Ukrainian Front, whose soldiers had entered Auschwitz. In mass media in the West, on the occasion of the announcement of the anniversary of Auschwitz liberation, there were terms such as in the German Television ZDF "der polnischen Vernichtungslager Majdanek und Auschwitz" (Polish extermination camps Majdanek and Auschwitz). Also the CNN television used the term ‘Polish camps’. This is a sign of determination in falsifying history and creating awareness of a recipient. A kind of the dot over ‘I’ was not inviting the daughter of a voluntary prisoner of Auschwitz for the ceremony, one of the most courageous people of the second world war, the colonel Witold Pilecki. Whereas a grandson of the commander of Auschwitz was present. Regardless of real intentions and public explanations, the sentence of the author Zofia Nałkowska that ‘People prepared this fate to other people’ is disappearing.
AA
„Niedziela” 6/2015