OTTAWA – The use of the word “Polish” to describe WWII ghettos or concentration camps breaches broadcasters’ ethics codes, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said today.
The decision concerned two news broadcasts in which “Polish” was used as a national adjective to describe Second World War phenomena: in one case, a ghetto, and, in the other, the concentration camp at Treblinka.
In the first case, on November 8, 2003, the CTV Television Network broadcast the story of a Holocaust survivor during the course of which the following statement was made: "He was five years younger than his audience when his family was forced into a Polish ghetto for Jews."
In the second, on April 30, 2004, CTV Newsnet described John Demjanjuk as “a notoriously sadistic guard at the Polish camp of Treblinka.” In all, complaints were received relating to one or the other or both of the news items from 126 individuals, of whom the then Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, as well as another Canadian of Polish extraction, requested adjudication of the matter by the CBSC. The Ambassador put his complaint in the following terms:
“The use of such words might leave doubts for Canadian viewers as to who created and operated ghettos in […] Nazi occupied Poland during WWII. There should be no doubt about it and any attempt to suggest otherwise is offensive to Poland and Polish people. […] There were ghettos for Jews in cities on the territory of Nazi occupied Poland, e.g. Warsaw ghetto, Lòdz ghetto or Bialystok ghetto, established by the Nazi authorities,” he wrote.
Although the initial CTV position was that the adjective “Polish” denoted only location and not responsibility, the CTV News Department modified its position and, on August 18, issued a strong internal advisory in which it indicated that henceforth CTV News programs must not use the adjective "Polish" when describing World War II concentration camps or ghettos that were created, built and run by Nazi Germany.
With respect to the broadcasts themselves, the National Specialty Services Panel said it “considers it essential to define its position on this issue. It concludes that the equivalent of the proper noun, or name, of a city is not the same as the national adjective “Polish”. Warsaw, Treblinka, Lòdz, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bialystok, Chelmno and so on are, as place names, the equivalent of “in Poland” as a geographical designator.
“They do not imply an involvement in the matters occurring in those locations. They are the appropriate designation for a camp or a ghetto. [… W]hen using the phrase “in Poland”, it is preferable to differentiate traditional historical Poland from its wartime incarnation (it should never be forgotten that it was the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 that led to the declaration of war on Germany by Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand on September 3 and by Canada on September 10) by the use of qualifiers such as “in occupied Poland” or “in Nazi-occupied Poland”.
“In any event, it is the position of the National Specialty Services Panel that the use of the terms “Polish ghetto for Jews" and “Polish camp of Treblinka” in news broadcasts on the dates indicated above was an inaccurate representation of the news and constituted an unfair and improper presentation of news […]” reads the decision.
