Political functionary as chief of the Auschwitz museum

My comment on the article Auschwitz museum chief offers to serve Nigerian boy Omar Farouq’s hard-labour sentence by Jane Flanagan in The Times, 30 September 2020.


Mr Cywiński is more of a political functionary than a museum director.

Here is part of my comment following the The Sunday Times article Holocaust novelists blur Nazi fact and fiction in bestsellers
by Andrew Holgate, 23 February 2020.

“The Museum did not invite Witold Pilecki’s son Andrzej and daughter Zofia, to the 70th anniversary of the Camp’s liquidation in 2015. Witold Pilecki was a Polish officer, who went to Auschwitz voluntarily, organised an underground resistance organisation there and sent reports about the Camp to the Polish resistance and the Polish government in exile in London.

At the same time, Museum issued an invitation to Rainer Hoess, 51, a grandson of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, to participate in the 70th anniversary ceremonies. Rainer is a well-known anti-Nazi.

After WWII, Witold Pilecki was executed by the functionaries of the Communist dictatorship in 1948. This is clearly the reason behind refusing to invite Zofia and Andrzej Pilecki to the 70th anniversary. The concentration camp lives on under new leadership and with new guards. This is the camp of social death and elimination from history. The narrative is being actively managed and controlled.”

The entire comment can be found under the original article as well as in my blog.

@LechSBorkowski