Mr. President,
You don't know me, but I know you, the Poles, well.
I was in Auschwitz and in Birkenau, and I made it out of hell alive.
I was the only one in my entire family to survive.
I was only 19.
After the camp, I returned home, because that was the only place I knew.
But there was no one there except for the gentile Poles who looked at me with hatred and asked, "Why didn't Hitler kill you?"
What else could I have felt other than disgust?
The Poles had already taken over our home. In my room, a Polish girl played with my dolls and my games.
From Poland, I went to Germany, where I met my husband, a Polish Holocaust survivor like me who also made it out of the death camp.
We married, had a child, and moved to Israel in 1949.
Since then, I have been back to Poland twice to see the home of my family, which no longer exists. Even today, if I was given a plane ticket, I would go again without hesitation.
Because your Poland, Mr. President, is also my homeland. It is where I was born, where I grew up, and from where I fled so as to live a normal life.
You cannot absolve yourselves of culpability for the death camps. You worked together with the Nazis.
If I were standing next to you, at my age, I would give you two slaps and tell you to your face: "To us, you were full partners in what transpired. Accept responsibility!"
I ask you please not to lend a hand to the distortion of history. That much you must do. Let history be.
