In an opinion piece published by the Washington Examiner, Stanisław Żaryn said the country has also been a victim of "unfair interpretations of the relations between the Poles and the Jews for quite a while now."
Żaryn, who serves as the director of the National Security Department at the Polish Prime Minister’s Office in Warsaw, argues in his piece that wartime Poland has all too often been described in international media "as Nazi Germany’s accomplice in the Holocaust."
"The current smear campaign against Poland and its people will eventually affect the way history, including the history of the Holocaust, will be interpreted," Żaryn warned in his opinion piece, which was posted by the American weekly magazine on its website this week.
"There is a high risk that the international public opinion will one day take it for granted that Poland and the Poles were the sole perpetrators of the Final Solution," Żaryn cautioned.
"This image, however, will not have anything in common with the facts or anything to do with the respect for the victims of the genocide inflicted by Nazi Germany," he said.
'Unprecedented lies about Poland'
Żaryn's opinion piece, entitled Fooling with facts on Poland's role in the Holocaust, came after a recent New Yorker article whose author, Masha Gessen, "implies that Poland was complicit in the murder of 3 million Jews during World War II," according to Żaryn.
Żaryn, who also serves as spokesman for Poland’s security services chief, asserts in his piece that the New Yorker op-ed by Gessen, entitled The Historians Under Attack for Exploring Poland’s Role in the Holocaust, could be "part of a wider trend in the international media to smear wartime Poland as the accomplice of Adolf Hitler in the extermination of Jews."
"Her article is just one of many attempts to throw suspicion on Poland," Żaryn said.
"If manipulations of history go unanswered," he added, "the green light is given for further activities of that sort."
A current-affairs commentator with the Forum of Polish Jews has slammed the New Yorker article by Gessen as "a gigantic, monstrous and vile falsification of the truth."
(gs/pk)
Source: PAP, washingtonexaminer.com