prisoners. The captions read: “My name is Józef Bałuk. I was 51 when the Germans murdered me in KL Auschwitz because I was a Polish railway worker” and “Poles were the first prisoners of the German death camp in Auschwitz”.

Each of these statements was either a bald-­faced lie or a half-lie at best. KL Auschwitz was not “created to exterminate the Poles”, because the only people exterminated by the Germans at Auschwitz were Jews. Poles were not “the first prisoners of the German death camp in Auschwitz” because they were never sent to the death camp in the first place, and although the Germans did murder many Polish railway workers, they certainly had no policy of killing the Polish members of that particular professional group.

“We also were the victims”, “The Poles suffered as much as the Jews” ran the headlines

The Jan Karski Institute of War Losses, which was responsible for this outrageous demonstration of Holocaust negationism, was created in 2022 by the Polish government. Tasked with reinforcing the official state narrative and seeking restitution payments from Germany, it joined the long list of public institutions involved in falsifying the history of the Shoah. The question is, where was the Auschwitz Museum during this whole sordid affair? The Jan Karski Institute’s propaganda posters were, after all, based on whitewash

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