Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other death camps, including Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, were conceived, built and operated by Nazi Germany and its allies. The camps were located in German-occupied Poland, the European country with by far the largest Jewish population, but they were most emphatically not "Polish camps". This is not a mere semantic matter. Historical integrity and accuracy hang in the balance.
Every issue has its extraordinary cases, that is the way of the nature. But, there are solid facts, that cannot be argued - such as water is liquid most of the time, and iron is solid. Same fact is about Poland - a country where millions of innocent people were tortured and murdered, where the concentration of death camps/facilities was the highest. That fact has much more weight and much more importance then any other. Why? Again, because of the ratio of rescued vs murdered and amount of death camps. Camps that where not hidden from locals - everybody saw trains stuffed with people, that came from all over Europe - and went out empty. Local people where working in those camps so it wasn't so much a secret. There was the biggest GETHO in Warsaw - also a unique thing about Poland.
So if you don't want to have 9 facts about Poland, so make it 11 - because every coin has 2 sides.
What did you want the locals to do exactly? Come on it's not like the Polish were the ones to setup the death camps/ghettos they were occupied. As the American Jewish Committee said:
Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other death camps, including Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, were conceived, built and operated by Nazi Germany and its allies. The camps were located in German-occupied Poland, the European country with by far the largest Jewish population, but they were most emphatically not "Polish camps". This is not a mere semantic matter. Historical integrity and accuracy hang in the balance.
As you say all coins have two sides but I think it's fair to celebrate helping people escape the holocaust esp when you've received the largest amount of Righteous Among the Nations awards from Israel for it.
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