A “distressed” Polish lawmaker on Thursday formally invited Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit several former concentration camps in his country to educate her on what went on there in the 1940’s verses what is going on at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019.
Ocasio-Cortez in recent days has compared President Trump’s detention policies at the border to Nazi concentration camps, drawing fire from both sides of the aisle for trivializing the experience of real Holocaust victims and survivors. In the face of overwhelming criticism, she has not only not apologized for her gross statements, she has doubled down.
Dominik Tarczyński, a member of the Polish Sejm (parliament), posted his letter inviting AOC to see Hitler’s concentration camps for herself on Twitter, Thursday.
“I write to you out of distress in having learned of your recent statements regarding concentration camps,” Tarczyński’s letter begins.
As you should be aware, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) who led Germany, were responsible for the darkest period in my country’s and our whole continent’s history by devising a chain of concentration camps in order to exterminate those who they believed were subhuman, or a threat to their imperialistic machinations- this included both Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles and as a result we lost six million of our citizens.
While under German Nazi occupation, a number of concentration camps were set up in my country, Poland. It has caused a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must deal with every single day, and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten, and never allowed to happen again.
“This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset.
Tarczyński urged Ocasio-Cortez to use “extreme caution” in attempting to leverage phrases such as “concentration camps” for political gain because it will “lead nowhere good.”
The Polish lawmaker invited AOC to visit five of the worst concentration camps in Poland, where millions of “human souls were extinguished” and millions more permanently scarred: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek.
Tarczyński concluded: “You speak often of bipartisanship, and I feel this is one area in particular where we can begin to live that ideal.”
With this letter, I am formally inviting @AOC to come to Poland,where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies pic.twitter.com/ivOTfmiCfo
— Dominik Tarczyński MEP (@D_Tarczynski) June 20, 2019
On Wednesday, the official Twitter account of Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust memorial center in Israel, urged the Socialist congresswoman to “learn about concentration camps.”
.@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of "extermination through labor."
Learn about concentration camps https://t.co/oBPQsjf6FC#Holocaust #History pic.twitter.com/nmc9As2nlO
— Yad Vashem (@yadvashem) June 19, 2019
A survivor of a Nazi concentration camp also had some words for AOC earlier this week:
Hi @AOC.
Meet David.
David has numbers on his arm.
They were tattooed on him by Nazis when David was in Auschwitz death camp.
Those Nazis killed David's entire family.
David has a message for anyone who thinks America runs “concentration camps.”
Hey AOC, you need to hear this: pic.twitter.com/jNQ0Vi75ov— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 18, 2019
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)