Auschwitz museum slams New Yorker Holocaust piece

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WARSAW, Poland — The AuschwitzBirkenau state museum has sharply denounced an article in the New Yorker that looks at Holocaust scholarship in Poland, accusing the magazine of publishing lies and distortions of Poland's role during World War II.

The government also reacted, with a deputy foreign minister, Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek, saying on Twitter that “this manipulation will be the subject of a strong reaction from Polish diplomacy.”

The Auschwitz museum is located in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the war. Today it is a Polish state institution that acts as the custodian of the remains of Nazi Germany's most notorious death camp. It is known to denounce cases of Holocaust denial and revisionism.

It spoke out sharply on Saturday after the New Yorker on Friday published an article by Masha Gessen, which looks at the case of two Polish historians of the Holocaust who were recently found guilty by a Polish court of defaming a deceased wartime village official.

The key points of contention surround a subtitle that says: “To exonerate the nation of the murders of three million Jews, the Polish government will go as far as to prosecute scholars for defamation.” That idea is repeated in the article's text.

Some 3 million Polish Jews were killed during the Holocaust, but the vast majority were directly murdered by Adolf Hitler's occupying Nazi forces in Poland. A Polish underground army resisted the Germans, and the Polish state, unlike other occupied nations, never collaborated with the Nazis.