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Obama’s dreadful
error about the
‘Polish death camps’
Alan Fisher
To many Americans one of the great appeals of Barack Obama is that he’s smart. He’s a Harvard graduate, a former editor of the institution’s prestigious Law Review. He is well-read and articulate.
Last week, the president was handing out medals of freedom. They are a recognition of an outstanding contribution to American life and culture. Bob Dylan was a recipient as was former secretary of state, Madeline Albright, the first woman to hold the office. There was a posthumous award. It went to Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who tried to tell the outside world about the mass murder of Jews in his country.
It is a remarkable story. Karski, a Catholic, smuggled himself into both the Warsaw ghetto and one of the concentration camps, which allowed him to see what was happening at first hand. He then took that information to President Roosevelt and other allied leaders, pleading for the world to act. He later became a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. He died in 2000.
In saying a few words about each, Barack Obama described the concentration camps as ‘Polish death camps’. Geographically, he is correct – six of Hitler’s concentration camps were located in Poland. However, to suggest that somehow the Poles were involved in their operation is a dreadful error.
The US president’s remarks have dominated the news in Poland. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk summed up the national feeling: ‘We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge and bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history, so painful for us here in Poland, in a country which suffered like no other in Europe during the second world war.
Barack Obama didn’t write the words that caused so much offence. He was simply repeating remarks someone had prepared.
Conservative columnist David Frum, who has family connections to Poland said the remarks were ‘a terrible insult’ and added that whichever White House aide was responsible for the speech ‘ought to have known enough and cared enough about his mission to have avoided this ignorant error’.
Defenders of President Obama said they understood, that he couldn’t be aware of some delicate nuances of the situation. His staff said he mis-spoke. Yet it’s hard to believe that someone as smart as Barack Obama didn’t have a basic understanding of a significant part of global history to realise that what he was saying was wrong, to clearly identify those responsible for what was being done in those dark, bleak places of fundamental evil and to understand that the world did little to stop it. And, in other places, it serves as a reminder of the dangers of failing to do so again.
If George Bush made a similar error, there would have been global howls of derision and many liberal commentators would have had a field day.
While unlikely to cause lasting damage in an election year, this was a diplomatic slip-up and an embarrassment to the White House. It’s a reminder of the damage such verbal mis-steps can inflict.
The Polish president wrote to the White House to ask for clarification and in return Barack Obama replied: ‘In referring to "a Polish death camp" rather than "a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland", I inadvertently used a phrase that has caused many Poles anguish over the years and one that Poland has rightly campaigned to eliminate from public discourse around the world. I regret the error and agree that this moment is an opportunity to ensure that this and future generations know the truth’.
Regretting the error falls short of an apology. For some Poles, it falls well short.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
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