Talk:"Polish death camp" controversy

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Clarify that claim by Yair Lapid was untrue

Article contains "Israeli politician Yair Lapid justified the expression "Polish death camps" with the argument that "hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier".[37]"

In the current form it violates WP:UNDUE by not making clear that it is an untrue claim (or misleading at best if it is counting all murdered Jews across history of the world). I propose to add a sentence making clear that it is a false statement Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:51, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Naming of Polish goverment after war

In the paragraph: "The amendment also prohibited use of the expression "Polish concentration camp" in relation to camps operated by the Polish government after the war on sites of former Nazi camps. In a court case in January 2018, Newsweek.pl was sentenced for referring to the Zgoda concentration camp, operated by Polish authorities after World War II, as a "Polish concentration camp"." There should be mention to clarify some controversy: "Zgoda was labour camp for people of different nationalities (mostly Polish) who collaborated with Nazi Germany and rebels opposing new, communist regime, it was run by Polish government, puppeted by Soviet Union."

In this state article looks like poles were murdering jews in Zgoda on their own will, that is misleading. 2A02:A311:4347:AC00:F155:13B3:8275:D89A (talk) 15:24, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

First use of the name "Polish Death Camp" by the editor of Jan Karski article 1944.

I have noticed that the large part of the Wikipedia text (in the chapter ==Public use of the expression==) exposes our discovery presented in above article slightly more extensively than before:

     "As early as 1944, the expression "Polish death camp" appeared as the title of a Collier's magazine article, "Polish Death Camp".      This was an excerpt from the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski's 1944 memoir, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (reprinted in 2010 as Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World). Karski himself, in both the book and the article, had used the expression "Jewish death camp", not "Polish death camp". As shown in 2019, the Collier's editor changed the title of Karski's article typescript, "In the Belzec Death Camp", to "Polish Death Camp". 
     

(In fact it is an important clarification which, if discovered earlier, could have reduced political and social tensions and controversies dramatically).

In the Wikipedia text there is also a notice that a better source is required. Therefore we propose that the current reference to the premature version of our article is replaced in the Wikipedia text (http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/%22Polish_death_camp%22_controversy) by this new-one, named here, scientific article. We further studiet the subject and elaborated more comprehensive text and published it in the scientific journal - CZECH-POLISH HISTORICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL JOURNAL (https://researcher.life/journal/czech-polish-historical-and-pedagogical-journal/12837 Vol.11,No.2(2019)) under the title "Is the Name “Polish Death Camps” a Misnomer?" https://journals.muni.cz/cphpjournal/article/view/15139 published

     With best regards
     Jacek Gancarson

eurofresh.se swiatowykongrespolakow.pl JacekVR (talk) 07:08, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Isn't it odd that none of the people claiming that "Polish death camp" implies Polish control has ever made a similar claim about "Jewish death camp". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:14, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

They did, I think. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:36, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your re-marque. For answer your question it is important to study etymology of both expressions.

From the beginning of the occupation of Poland Germans started different places of forced isolation for different groups of people. There were prisons, forced labor camps, Russian POWs camps, gettos for Jew and so on. Typically the high death tool in these facilities were caused by very high level of exploration of imprisoned persons. But death camps were built with the idea to kill the Jews. So when the terrorized society realized what was the goal of the busters it was natural for Poles, Polish Jews and German Nazi occupiers to call these death camps "Jewish death camps". It was directly understandable by all involved in the region.

Poles were generally not sent to the death camps. A lot of Polish elite were shot or imprisoned at the beginning of the occupation so the underground movement intensified and Nazis tried to fight it by intensifying the terror. But death camps were built of racial prejudice only for Jews and Sinti. However outside the German Nazis' occupied Poland the term "Jewish death camps" might have be taken out of above local context and therefore sounded strange and irrelevant. And it certainly sounds so now - these camps were not controlled by Jews. The Jews were victims there.

On the other hand the term "Polish death camps" might be created outside Poland by the perpetrators from all over the Europe who sent Jews to these death camps in occupied Poland. It might have been full understandable then both by the perpetrators and the victims in the times of the crime. But the death camps were not controlled by Poles. So naming them like this have never been relevant after the WW2 and the Holocaust. The first meaning of the term Polish or Jewish is always the nationality or ethnicity, so it point to the property rather than to the territory. Although this controversial term have been improperly and not in line with etymologic rules explored in many ways until the very recent times. JacekVR (talk) 23:28, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

What Poles or Germans or even Jews understand it to mean is really beside the point. In English, both "Polish death camps" and "Jewish death camps" are perfectly normal formulations. Yes, they both are open to misinterpretation, but they would be used in situations where the context makes the meaning clear. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:58, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

@Piotrus@Khajidha Great, however the subject here is an improvement of the wikipedia article content in line with the rules and the remarque of the editor inside the text of the article: Please just replace the reference 47 with a scientific source: https://journals.muni.cz/cphpjournal/article/view/15139 Science is good and can prevent the wars. Many thanks in advance. JacekVR (talk) 00:19, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

@JacekVR Is there a reason you cannot edit the article yourself? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:07, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Given the wording of some of their statements, I think User:JacekVR may actually be Jacek Gancarson (one of the authors of that source). --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:37, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Not to mention that the very basis of the complaint is silly. The original editor of the WWII era article probably changed it from "Belzec Deathcamp" to "Polish Deathcamp" because he knew that virtually none of his readers would have the first clue where "Belzec" was. The fact that "Polish" was substituted for a specific location is the ultimate proof that it IS just a location based name and that the whole uproar is due to non-native speakers mistranslating things and then getting upset at their own mistaken translations. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:41, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Dear @Khajidha What are you really talking about? Are you a secondary school student? What the mess here? Can you analyze the above text in English or any English text or not? Why are you so distressed? Maybe you are lacking concentration to read it. It is totally pointless to discuss with you. So please read the text above again and the article in question before you present here your emotional biased exclamations. You do not deserve any further discussion with me on the subject before you do your job. Good luck. JacekVR (talk) 22:20, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

No. You simply do not understand English word "occupation". As you started with naming it is your problem. I already explained it above for but it did not helped. Even if you use once the term "to be in control of the facility" you compulsively escape to discussion about of the territory. It not logical. It is an emotional bias. So I try again: If somebody takes your house and produce drugs there is it your production facility and is it you who will be charged for it or not? There is more explanation in our scientific article which I warmly recommend https://journals.muni.cz/cphpjournal/article/view/15139 JacekVR (talk) 00:48, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

The fact that death camp in Karski article's title was named Polish and not German shows that it was only a malicious emotional and misleading joke. JacekVR (talk) 01:10, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Correct JacekVR (talk) 21:59, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I tried to edit the post but failed. That is why I submitted the proposal in talks. But now I noticed that I can edit the post and propose the reference iupdate by myself. My older require more time;-) JacekVR (talk) 22:39, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

When I log in to the article I can see the code but I can not edit the text and therefore I can not update the reference . Please help. JacekVR (talk) 00:29, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

The fact that the camp in Karski's article was named "Polish" and not "German" only shows that it was located in Poland. There is no indication of nationality or control implied in the phrasing. Only in your misunderstanding of it. Was there any indication in the article that it was controlled by Poland? No. In fact, the existing reference 47 already shows that the fact that the camps were controlled by the Nazis was immediately made clear in the subtitle of the article. As for your hypothetical about my house, it fails to parallel the situation. While a drug lab in a stolen home could not be called by the name of the owner of the home, it could quite easily and logically be called by the location of that home. Such a drug lab in my house could be called a "Long View drug lab" (after my town), a "North Carolina drug lab" (after my state) or even an "American drug lab" (after my country) with no indication that said lab was controlled by the town, state, or country, much less the homeowner. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 01:38, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you that you have read at least some parts of our article. If you had read all our new article https://doi.org/10.5817/cphpj-2019-022 you would understand why using the word Polish did not make ANY sense and was rather out of context. What would it bring to the readers except disinformation? Poland was an ally engaged on all 3 fronts. A dramatic uprising against German Nazies just broke up and was on the way in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. They were in dramatic need of prompt military support. Was the naming the death camp "Polish" a stalinistic agency effort to dissuade, in line with Stalin desire, any help for Warsaw insurgents? What would be otherwise the reason to talk about the territory instead of enemies crimes? What would be the context then? During the Holocaust this "territorial" context was used by the perpetrators from all over the Europe who were sending the Jews to the Nazi death camps.

You can also read in our article that, as Karski article was in fact only a chapter of the book to be published soon, it used only the name Nazies without any explanation that it were German nazies, some Ukrainian and few Latvian. So using the word Polish in the title was kindly speaking particularly misinformative.

Referring to the comparison with a drug lab the above situation does not remind the lab address. It just correspond to the name "an American drug lab", even if the owner was kicked off from the house by the a Russian mafia gang. Did it have ANY informative value? JacekVR (talk) 15:50, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

What did it bring to the readers? IT TOLD THEM WHERE IT WAS. Why is this so hard for you to understand? With Poland being an ally of the United States, calling attention to the fact that these atrocities were happening IN POLAND would make the case even stronger for the US to help Poland. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:11, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

OK. Thank you very much for the explanation. JacekVR (talk) 21:15, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

It may be this article is semiprotected, meaning your account needs to have some months of editing before you can edit it. I can certainly update the reference (which one is obsolete and which one is newer)? But I am not sure what else exactly are you asking. Ideally, could you put here the old text (code) and next to it, the new one so I and others can see exactly what you want to change/update? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:39, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your help. It took us some effort to conduct our researches with support from other researches but without any funds;-(. One can observe now there are more and more of our finding are mentioned in this interesting article which we believe is important for general scientific progress. Our finding was first recognized by Waldemar Piasecki the personal biographer of Jan Karski. all 3 references show how this information has been added to the public knowledge.s So we propose now that our scientific article will be simply added as the 3 reference between current references No 47 and 48.

The current text reads:

The new text (if accepted) will be:

JacekVR (talk) 14:09, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

or in the article location -

Current text:

As early as 1944, the expression "Polish death camp" appeared as the title of a Collier's magazine article, "Polish Death Camp". This was an excerpt from the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski's 1944 memoir, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (reprinted in 2010 as Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World). Karski himself, in both the book and the article, had used the expression "Jewish death camp", not "Polish death camp". As shown in 2019, the Collier's editor changed the title of Karski's article typescript, "In the Belzec Death Camp", to "Polish Death Camp".

Proposed text:

As early as 1944, the expression "Polish death camp" appeared as the title of a Collier's magazine article. This was an excerpt from the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski's 1944 memoir, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (reprinted in 2010 as Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World). Karski himself, in both the book and the article, had used the expression "Jewish death camp", not "Polish death camp". As shown in 2019, the Collier's editor changed the title of Karski's article typescript, "In the Belzec Death Camp", to "Polish Death Camp". JacekVR (talk) 16:17, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Please delete the second occurence of "Polish Death Camp" from your first sentence. It is a useless repetition that reads very clunkily. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:14, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Is it OK like corrected above? JacekVR (talk) 23:50, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Piotrus@Khajidha I can not make this correction by myself because I have no permission to edit the text of the post "Polish Death Camps controversy". JacekVR (talk) 22:46, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

@JacekVR Done. Thank you for bringing this better source to our attention, it's always a win-win for everyone - Wikipedia article gets more reliable, and the article in question will get more visibility through the link from Wikipedia. If you would like to fix anything else in the article, please do let us know. Note that you'll be able to edit it yourself after your account is autoconfirmed, which is a combination of account's age and a number of edits. The reshold, IIRC, is 30 days (which you have) and 500 edits (you have only 32). I invite you to make more edits to Wikipedia, there are many articles open to editing by everone - after some editing you'll be able to edit anything, anytime. On a final note, article about Jan Karski is in dire need of improvement. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:26, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello, Thank you for the help. Long live Wikipedia;-). To start with I can fix the wikipedia remarks on [citation needed] in the text http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Jan_Karski if I obtain edit status for it. JacekVR (talk) 09:33, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

@JacekVR I'll be looking forward to that. In the meantime, I recommend making some edits to other topics of your expertise or interest. Most articles on Wikipedia are not protected from new editors, but many WWII topics related to Holocaust are since they have attracted some serious vandalism in the past. Given the overchoice problem when it comes to "what to edit", I'd suggest checking Wikipedia:WikiProject_Poland#Article_alerts for example. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:17, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

References

Holocaustforgotten.com; Lukas

The article currently states:

Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and the helper's entire family. Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II, up to 50,000 were executed by Germany solely for saving Jews.

References

1. The first source is a dubious-looking website holocaustforgotten.com, which makes an erroneous claim that Poland was the only territory where aid to Jews was punishable by death.
2. 50,000 number of non-Jewish Poles killed for aiding Jews is not borne out by contemporary research.

Suggest this paragraph be removed. -- K.e.coffman (talk) 07:53, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the second sentence, what is the number borne out by contemporary research? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:54, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Here's the info, from Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (2023-02-09). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 0 (0): 1–58. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648.:

...the number of Poles executed by the Germans solely for helping the Jews was not in the thousands, as the Wikipedia page claims. Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the number of Polish victims killed for aiding Jews was closer to 800.[Footnote 33] More recently, historians reevaluated these estimates downward still.[Footnote 34]

On Lukas's methodology, the authors write:

In order to shore up the argument about the alleged thousands of Poles killed for rescuing Jews, the Wikipedia article cites Richard C. Lukas’s 1989 book Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust, a book that has been heavily criticized by experts. Page thirteen of this book estimates that ‘a few thousand to fifty thousand’ Poles were killed by Germans for rescuing Jews. Yet, Out of the Inferno comprises little more than an anthology of short testimonies collected, edited, and introduced by Lukas.

--K.e.coffman (talk) 01:16, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. It would be good to use the sources the authors mention in the footnote rather then their passing comment. Those are Ryszard Walczak et al. (eds.), Those Who Helped: Polish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Warszawa: IPN, 1997). (no page number) and Martyna Grądzka-Rejak and Aleksandra Namysło, (eds.), Represje za pomoc Żydom na okupowanych ziemiach polskich w czasie II wojny światowej, vol. 1 (Warsaw: IPN, 2019), p. 464. As for Lukas, who are those experts heavily criticizing the book? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:27, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback -- I removed the paragraph in this edit: diff. Feel free to cite the number of executed rescuers to the sources you mention. As far as who else criticized Out of the Inferno, this question seems to be out of scope for this discussion. Perhaps ask at Talk:Richard C. Lukas, where the book is covered? --K.e.coffman (talk) 19:27, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

@K.e.coffman I think the sources should be added to the Rescue... article, but I am having trouble justifying reading this content here, even with better sources. It seems like the exact issue that G&K made in their piece, with which I of course has some issues, but overall, this is not very relevant here (per criticism of "heroic narrative"). In the version we edited we had one paragraph about Polish collaboration and three paragraphs about Polish rescue of Jews. "Historical context" is relevant but I think it has grown too much, resulting in undue weight issues. I've done some minor edits to address this, perhaps you could give it a pass of your own and see if anything else can be tidied up? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:58, 19 March 2023 (UTC)