Via @ipngovpl_eng 

What’s wrong with this picture?

A teenager in concentration camp garb is what’s wrong. 

And what’s equally troubling is the distorted narrative that has been constructed around this image.

When it seemed that Poland might enforce the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister ahead of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, American lawyer Alan Dershowitz made a sweeping and inflammatory statement. 

He said:

“Let it be an event in which the Polish people alone, or the Polish people, together with the Ukrainians and others who helped kill the Jews, let them celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of people they put in the camps.”

Why are we stepping in?

Because this statement deliberately distorts history. It removes responsibility from the true perpetrators and places blame on those who suffered under the same brutality. 

If only the boy in the image could speak to Mr. Dershowitz, perhaps he’d set the record straight. 

That boy is Zbyszek Prawdziuk, an 18-year-old Polish student from Rzeszów. 

He was one of 40 students rounded up by the Gestapo on May 1, 1940, and one of the 728 men—primarily Poles—who became the first prisoners of Auschwitz.

The reality of Auschwitz’s early days
For the first twenty months, Auschwitz was primarily a concentration camp for Poles: members of the intelligentsia, resistance fighters, community leaders, and clergy. 

These individuals, like Zbyszek, were targeted as part of the German effort to crush Polish culture and identity. 

Of the original 728 prisoners, only half survived. From the 40 students taken from Rzeszów, only 19 lived to see liberation.

So, who put Zbyszek into a striped uniform and turned him into prisoner number 667? 

The answer is clear: it was the Germans. Auschwitz was a German concentration camp, managed by German SS staff, funded by German state agencies, and supported by German corporations that profited from slave labor. 

Yet, eighty years later, an American lawyer erases this truth and blames the victims instead.

His fate and the Final Solution
Zbyszek never lived to see the horrors of the Final Solution. 

He turned 19 in the camp but was killed before he could turn 20. 

He was murdered in April 1941, his body burned in the crematorium, and his uniform recycled for another victim. 

By spring 1942, Auschwitz became the center of the Holocaust, with Jewish prisoners arriving in the thousands, most gassed on arrival. 

Those selected for labor joined Polish prisoners in enduring unimaginable suffering: starvation, disease, executions, forced labor, and medical experiments.

However, Zbyszek’s short life and death remind us of the camp’s beginnings. 

Auschwitz was not yet a death factory for Europe’s Jews—it was a place of torment and extermination for Poles. 

Yet, 80 years later, Mr. Dershowitz ignores this reality, rewrites history, and places Zbyszek and his fellow Poles as perpetrators rather than victims.

We do not wish to engage in politics, but history demands accuracy. It is vital to name the killers and the victims. 

The German SS set up and ran Auschwitz, and the atrocities committed there were part of a deliberate, state-sponsored plan. 

To claim otherwise is not only a gross distortion but an insult to the memory of people like Zbyszek Prawdziuk, who were murdered by the very system that Mr. Dershowitz misrepresents.

So, we ask: would Mr. Dershowitz repeat his statement to Zbyszek’s face? 

Would he look this young man in the eye and accuse him of being complicit in his own death?

Remembering Zbyszek Prawdziuk
Zbyszek, Auschwitz who was brought to the camp on June 14, 1940, and killed on April 18, 1941. 

His life and death, along with those of countless others, serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of historical revisionism.

By the way, I never even encountered him on Twitter, but I’m blocked. 

Such is “open dialogue” with these types…