PMM: The Red Army's Capture of Berlin in 1945 Doesn't Erase Earlier Years of History

28/01/2020

12:03

PMM:

The Red Army's Capture of Berlin in 1945 Doesn't Erase Earlier Years of History

Michał Olech

Yesterday, we marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. A moment that also serves as a day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust, the victims of a terrible German crime during World War II, a crime against Jews and Poles. The extermination camps were sites of unimaginable atrocity, of unimaginable genocide. Yesterday, I also had the opportunity to visit the memorial site in Berlin where the Wannsee Conference took place on January 20, 1942. It was a moment when the machinery of death gained momentum, and the industrial-scale death apparatus was fully implemented across the territories of the Third Reich. Poles experienced this particularly cruelly, and at this very location where the conference was held, the terrible prelude to annihilation, the extermination actions against the Polish intelligentsia from the very beginning of World War II, from 1939 onwards in the occupied territories, were also showcased – stated Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a conversation with journalists in Berlin. All these topics are very important because they build a platform for understanding with Germany, an understanding based on truth. Only in this way can understanding and reconciliation be achieved, and this is important because there are those today who try to falsify history. That is why yesterday, during the concert to which Chancellor Merkel invited me, I spoke, of course, about the terrible genocide that was the Holocaust, but I also mentioned what the Gulag was – a system of concentration camps, extermination in a different way, through hunger, frost, disease, but also, of course, executions and death in countless ways on the 'inhumane land,' as Józef Czapski wrote. And it is necessary to remind about this as well, because millions of Poles perished there precisely in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Kolyma, Vorkuta, and hundreds of other places in the territory of the Soviet Union, today's Russia. And the fact that the Red Army later captured Berlin in 1945 does not change the earlier years of history – PMM continued to say.

Michał Olech

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