Polecam bardzo, chociaz po angielsku.Pochodzi z kanadyjskiego National Post
z dnia 4 grudnia, tego roku.
W.Glowacki
____________
War crimes trial creates furor
Pole to be prosecuted for deaths of Germans
BY JUSTIN SPARKS
PRAGUE The trial of a78-year-old Pole accused of killing thousands of
German civilians in the aftermath of the Second World War is set to become
the first in a series of court cases in which Germans are seen as the
victims, instead 6f the perpetrators, of Nazi-related crimes.
The trial, scheduled to begin early next year in the Polish city of Opole,
has created a furor over a part of history Poland would like to ignore.
Czeslaw Geborski, the accused, is said to have systematically raped,
tortured and murdered German civilians while serving as commandant of the
Lambinowice concentration camp in Silesia, where Germans living in the
region were interned after the war. Franciszek Lewandowski, one of the
prosecutors, said, "The main charge we are bringing against him is that he
ordered a building in the camp to be burned down, killing 48 people. As
people tried to escape the flames, he personally shot them or had them
flung back inside."
The concentration camp was built by the Nazis to house Allied prisoners of
war. For most Poles, it is inextricably associated with wartime atrocities
committed by the Germans. The trial is set to reverse those roles and
portray a Pole as the villain, something unacceptable to many who lived
through the German occupation and the deaths of about three million
civilian Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles through bombings
and concentration camps.
Piotr Radziwinowicz, a 72-year-old pensioner whose father was killed during
the occupation, said:"The trial should be stopped. In view of what the
Nazis did on Polish soil, it was inevitable that some German civilians
would be killed in revenge. It was chaos at the end of the war, but we
never did anything like the Nazis. They killed millions of Poles."
A museum at the Lambinowice concentration camp commemorates the many Poles
and Allied PoWs who died there at the hands of the Nazis, but makes scant
mention of the thousands of Germans who later suffered the same fate.
In the decades following the Al-lied victory, the communists erased such
events from their history, and young Poles today know little or nothing
about the acts of retribution meted out to German civilians in Silesia and
the former East Prussia.
Dr. Maruska Svasek, a Central European specialist at Queen's University,
Belfast, said, "Hundreds of thousands of German civilians across Central
Europe were raped, tortured, killed, or died due to terrible conditions
after the war, but communist historiography was simply anti-Nazi and
pro-communist, and disregarded the truth about postwar, anti-German crimes."
Werner Scholz, a German Silesian who was sent to the camp at the age of
eight, with his grand-mother and sister neither of whom survived, believes
real reconciliation can never take place between Germans and their Central
European neighbours until the "criminals" are brought to justice.
"Everywhere you looked in the camp, there were people dead or dying," he
said. "If a person wasn't beaten to death, then he simply died of typhus,
dysentery or starvation. A cold would be enough to finish him off. These
were crimes, like Nazi crimes, and they should be treated in the same way
and perpetrators brought to justice."
Lambinowice was just one of hundreds of Nazi concentration camps in Central
Europe which exchanged its Jewish and Allied PoWs for German soldiers and
civilians once the war had ended. About 10 million Germans were expelled
from their homes in the region. In Poland alone, between 400,000 and 1.2
million were killed in revenge attacks.
The prospect of Lambinowice creating a precedent for the prosecution of
postwar acts of retribution has provoked widespread unease. Witold Kulesza
of the Central Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish
Nation said seven more trials are being prepared in Poland.
Mr. Geborski's trial, which involves 40 volumes of evidence and more than
300 witnesses, is likely to last up to a year.
The Daily Telegraph
[4:32 PM 12/5/2000]
