Poland seeks to change official name of Auschwitz death camp

Haaretz Daily
Apr. 02, 2006

Poland wants to change the official name of the Auschwitz death camp on the United Nation's world heritage directory to emphasize that it was run by German Nazis, not Poles, an official said Thursday.

The government requested that UNESCO, the UN's educational and cultural body, change the name from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau," Culture Ministry spokesman Jan Kasprzyk said.

Polish officials have complained in the past that foreign media sometimes refer to Auschwitz - a death camp located in occupied Poland where Nazi Germans killed 1.5 million people during World War II - as a "Polish concentration camp."

That phrasing deeply offends sensitivities in Poland, which was subjected to a brutal occupation by Adolf Hitler's Nazi forces.

"In the years after the war, the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was definitively associated with the criminal activities of the national socialist Nazi regime in Germany. However, for the contemporary, younger generations, especially abroad, that association is not universal,'' Kasprzyk was quoted by the PAP news agency as saying.

"The proposed change in the name leaves no doubt as to what the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was," Kasprzyk said.

Polish officials hope to hear back about their request by the middle of the year.

The death camp at Auschwitz was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

Auschwitz escapee dies of cancer
One of five Jewish inmates who escaped Auschwitz and who subsequently warned of the presence of Nazi death camps during World War II succumbed to cancer in Vancouver this week at the age of 82, the Globe And Mail reported Friday.

Rudolph Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who was deported by the Nazis to the death of Majdanker, ended up in Auschwitz in 1942. Two years later, he and another inmate, Alfred Wetzler, escaped from nearby Birkenau.

Vrba and Wetzler are credited with warning Hungarian Jews of the gas chambers and saving the lives of 100,000 Jews who would otherwise have unwittingly been fated for death.

Vrba made his living in Canada, where he became an emeritus professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.