Sir, I was very saddened by the article “Two waves of immigration, Poles apart ” by Giles Coren (July 26). The issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified in his emotional text. During the Second World War Poland was the target of the Nazi Germany’s aggression, and the Poles themselves were treated as the race of sub-humans. Any sort of assistance given to Jews was punished by death. Such assistance required heroism, as it was not only one’s own life that was put at stake, but also the lives of one’s family. Still, it is the Poles that make up the most of those awarded Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.

I will not make detailed references to the remaining aggressive remarks on Poland, unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge. What I find most important is that the general public, as result of similar publications, should not lose an understanding of what the Holocaust was and who the perpetrators were. In short, Nazi Germany decided to wipe out the whole nation. This was unprecedented in human history. Poland’s role in the tragedy of the Holocaust consists in the fact that the extermination of the Jewish people happened to take place on Polish territory. The author seems to have forgotten that Poles were not responsible for devising and perpetrating this hideous crime.

Polish and Jewish people share many chapters in their histories, for good and for worse. It is not my intention to try to erase the anti-Semitic acts of the past. For more than ten years, the Polish Embassy in London has been hosting scientific conferences of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, during which various aspects of Polish-Jewish co-existence on Polish territory are examined in detail from the scientific point of view. The Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw publishes successive reports on the subject. Polish political leaders have many times addressed their apologies to the Jewish community.

Poles who are currently arriving in the UK contribute through their hard and dedicated work to the development and prosperity of this country and surely do not deserve the contempt meted out to them by Mr Coren.

Barbara Tuge-Erecinska
The Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the United Kingdom

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