Some days we're just angry

It's going to be a depressing couple of days as the world observes the 60th anniversary of the liberation (if one can call it that) of Auschwitz. There's not a whole lot useful to be said about a crime which gets no less monstrous with the passing years, and it doesn't help much that there are still a few perpetrators who will make it to the grave via a natural death having never faced any kind of reckoning for their role in it.

Instead we propose to be a little more parochial about it and highlight a couple of relevant things from Wednesday's Irish Times (both require subs.). First, there's a letter to the editor from the Polish Ambassador in Dublin contesting an article's description of the camps as Polish. We began reading the letter sympathetic to its argument, because the labelling of the camps as Polish is an old trick of Holocaust deniers. But then we got to this:

We, in Poland, attach much importance to the accuracy of descriptions of Nazi camps located in Poland. Historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were not only at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, but also over 140,000 Poles, 20,000 Gypsies, 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities.

Note the distinction between Jews and Poles -- the latter category clearly excludes Polish Jews, since the number is way too small to cover Polish Jews killed in the camp.*

The paper also contains a damning article by Joe Carroll describing the censorship regime in the neutral Republic during World War II. This was interpreted to include barring any reporting of the Nazi atrocities, and one simply reads aghast of one incident after another:

The chief censor, Thomas Coyne, was writing in May 1945 as the Nazi death camps were being revealed to the world: "The publication of atrocity stories, whether true or false, can do this country no good and may do it much harm." ...

When I [reporter] interviewed Aiken [the minister] years later for my book on Irish neutrality, he brushed aside the charge that he prevented the Irish public from judging which side was in the right by suppressing reports of German and Japanese atrocities. "One side was as bad as the other," he said ...

Reports of atrocities could not be permitted because they might be false. But even if true they must be censored because people might then form opinions on which side was morally right. This could endanger neutrality ...

The censorship even clamped down on reports from the Vatican about the persecution of the Catholic Church, especially in Poland, by the Nazis.

The Irish Press [pro Government newspaper] had told its readers in April 1943: "There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the Six-County nationalists have not also endured."

All in all, our own little contribution to the global indifference to the Holocaust. But of course, we had plenty of company. We especially can't help but be cynical in advance of whatever pleasing photograph will come from Poland on Thursday, of European heads of state with their best sad faces on, perhaps reminding themselves that this isn't some gig like the Airbus launch where the task is to look jovial about the New Europe, but to look mournful about the old one.

We've never in our life had a good word to say about a column of Mark Steyn's. But in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph, he has a hypothetical sentence that perfectly captures the cynical superficiality of it all: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish."

*UPDATE Jan 27: This straightforward BBC Q&A on Auschwitz provides numbers that makes clear that the Polish Ambassador is massaging the numbers, inflating the number of non-Jewish Polish deaths but not including Polish Jews in the count of Polish dead.