.
The American "collectors' rights" lobbyists are always moaning about how loathe those foreign nations are to loan them objects (which they say are their "right" under the US-drafted CCPIA). Yet what happens when they do? We saw an Italian painting seized from a Florida museum which is not going back to Italy. Now the Polish press are up in arms. Auschwitz-Birkenau is a protected site, it is a World Heritage Site, and yet out of the goodness of the heart of the Polish people we lent the Holocaust Museum in Washington half a barrack building from Birkenau.
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It was a ten year loan in 1989. That loan was renewed for another ten years, so they've had it twenty years. The loan expired in 2009. Now it is time for it to come home. Guess what? The Americans don't want to give it back. Piotr Cywiński, the Director of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau has asked for it back. According to the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Washington has stopped answering letters on the subject, and is trying to engage the US Jewish community to put pressure on the Poles to let it stay.
According to the newspapers, they are using all sorts of arguments. the object is "too fragile to travel" (what, it has been in the care of a US museum a mere two decades and is now in a worse state than when it arrived there?).
What really hurts is the other one being reported in the Polish papers which is a pure and simple ignorant insult by simple ignorant people to raise the passions of a simple and ignorant American public (coiney style):
The American "collectors' rights" lobbyists are always moaning about how loathe those foreign nations are to loan them objects (which they say are their "right" under the US-drafted CCPIA). Yet what happens when they do? We saw an Italian painting seized from a Florida museum which is not going back to Italy. Now the Polish press are up in arms. Auschwitz-Birkenau is a protected site, it is a World Heritage Site, and yet out of the goodness of the heart of the Polish people we lent the Holocaust Museum in Washington half a barrack building from Birkenau.
It was a ten year loan in 1989. That loan was renewed for another ten years, so they've had it twenty years. The loan expired in 2009. Now it is time for it to come home. Guess what? The Americans don't want to give it back. Piotr Cywiński, the Director of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau has asked for it back. According to the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Washington has stopped answering letters on the subject, and is trying to engage the US Jewish community to put pressure on the Poles to let it stay.According to the newspapers, they are using all sorts of arguments. the object is "too fragile to travel" (what, it has been in the care of a US museum a mere two decades and is now in a worse state than when it arrived there?).
What really hurts is the other one being reported in the Polish papers which is a pure and simple ignorant insult by simple ignorant people to raise the passions of a simple and ignorant American public (coiney style):
W gazetach pojawiły się zaś sugestie, że Polacy jako współodpowiedzialni za Holocaust nie zasługują na to, aby opiekować się obiektem.["in the newspapers - ie the American ones - the suggestion has been made that since the Poles were co-responsible for the Holocaust they do not deserve to look after this object"] In that vein, we could add that as a hotbed of Holocaust Denial, the US certainly is not.
[In passing we may note that the US newspapers are not exactly busting a gut to produce an account of the operation of Birkenau which corresponds to reality, the accounts I have seen contain several factual errors]
The segment in Washington is half a prefabricated barrack block from Birkenau, the other half remains on the site.
"We have indicated many times that this half of the barracks must return, that there is no other solution in accordance with the law," Cywinski said. "It's a very important object, not just for Washington but for the integrity of Birkenau, the last authentic site of Holocaust remembrance among all the major death camps." [...] The fate of Cywinski, the Auschwitz museum director, is at stake in the matter. Under the law on protecting historic artifacts, he could be jailed for up to two years if he fails to obtain the return of any object on loan.The Polish law is designed to make sure that nobody has any leeway in allowing Polish artefacts to leave the country permanently Poland is trying to protect the artefacts in its care, all of them.
Of course nobody here has anything whatsoever against Americans getting on a plane and coming to see the whole Birkenau complex, not just the portable antiquity that they've made of just one tiny bit of it. After all, is that not precisely what they want all the citizens of other nations to do to see the bits and pieces collected in US "universal" (encyclopaedic) museums? Poland was home to Europe's largest Jewish community of some 3.2 million before World War Two, but most of them died under the Nazi occupation. The Auschwitz-Birkenau open-air museum covers more than 200 hectares (500 acres) and 155 buildings, including the gas chambers, 300 ruined facilities and hundreds of thousands of personal items.
Members of my family and the families of several people I know died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were not Jews.
America, give back what does not belong to you, please.
Psm, 'USA "pożyczyły" barak z Birkenau. Teraz nie chcą go oddać' PAP 28th u 23, 2012Vignette: Washington Holocaust Disneyland: A ten year LOAN from Poland, the Americans want to keep it.
