Petition demanding the dismissal of Barbara Nowacka from the Ministry of National Education
Donald Tusk
Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland
Dear Sir,
We are shocked and outraged by the recent statement of Barbara Nowacka, the Minister of National Education of Poland, who said that “Polish Nazis built camps” such as the German concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This statement deserves the strongest condemnation and requires a decisive response from the Prime Minister of the government which Minister Nowacka represents. All the more so because it exactly fits in with the overall policy of Minister Barbara Nowacka.
It is an unheard-of scandal that the head of the Ministry of Education uttered her words during the international conference “We are Memory. Teaching history is learning to dialogue”, organized to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German death camp. The event should serve to spread the truth about the attitudes and roles of Poles during World War II, especially in the face of the mass extermination of Jews. It is with regret that we must evaluate this statement as fitting the context of Minister Nowacka’s other actions, such as limiting and removing from the core curriculum the teaching of the history of the Polish people during the Nazi German occupation.
Ładowanie formularza
It restricted students access to knowledge about Polish heroes connected with the camp, those who were its victims and who informed the world about the tragic reality of the camp at the risk of their lives, such as the martyr St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe and Major Witold Pilecki. The minister is also responsible for the fact that the new curriculum contains less information about other camps, such as the extermination camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, where a total of one million people were murdered. The information of the German plunder of Polish works of art and the economic exploitation of Polish land during the occupation also vanished from the curriculum.
A person who attempts to confuse the minds of children, and to replace the knowledge of German crimes and the role of Poles during World War II with ideology does not deserve to be a minister of education for the Polish government. On the contrary, she is in need of education herself. A person who removes from Polish education and thus from Polish national memory the masters and masterpieces of Polish literature such as “The Tomb of Agamemnon” by Juliusz Słowacki, “Quo Vadis” by Henryk Sienkiewicz and “Pan Tadeusz” by Adam Mickiewicz which have shaped Polish identity for more than a century, should not be Poland’s minister of education. Children and adolescents must not be the victims of an experiment in which they lose access to the essence of Polish identity, and in its place are fed with ideology-soaked sex education, which is about to enter Polish schools under the guise of “health education.” Enough is enough!
We negatively assess the overall activity of Barbara Nowacka as the Minister of Education and demand her dismissal. Polish school must teach the truth about Polish-German relations, so that children do not repeat historical falsehoods that Ms. Nowacka spreads.
We demand your firm reaction.
The depolonization of the Polish school continues!
The current ruling coalition, which took power in Poland in December 2023, is causing a dramatic deterioration in the quality of teaching in Polish schools. Science will be replaced by ideology, as evidenced by the fact that Polish heroes along with classes of religion are already being gradually replace in Polish schools by the teaching of permissive sex education.
Barbara Nowacka, the current Education Minister is herself repeated lies about World War II, formulating the thesis that “Polish Nazis built the camps” of extermination. The fact that such a person occupies the position of Minister of Education is an embarrassment to the Polish state and nation.
The Ministry of Education has changed the core curriculum, limiting and sometimes fully removing masterpieces of literature important for Polish national identity. They eliminated or curtailed the works of such masters as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Stefan Żeromski or Henryk Sienkiewicz. The works of prominent representatives of the Polish Church, including St. Pope John Paul II and Blessed Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, have completely disappeared from the school reading list.
We must not permit the further depolonization of Polish schools. We protest against the policies of the Polish government.
The Education Minister, who accuses Poles of building German death camps, is responsible for expunging the information about Polish victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau
“In an area occupied by Germany, the Polish Nazis built camps that were labor camps and later became mass extermination camps.”
~Minister Barbara Nowacka
These words were uttered by the head of the Ministry of Education during the international conference “We are Memory. Teaching history is learning to dialogue,” held on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German death camp.
These outrageous words are a slander, striking at our ancestors and Polish national heroes, especially at the more than 100,000 Poles for whom this camp was built, and where they were murdered!
In past years, Polish diplomacy has repeatedly reacted to dishonest descriptions in the Western press referring to “Polish death camps.” Since we were outraged by how outsiders wrote about us, we should be even more outraged by the statement of a Polish government member. We have the right to expect the highest standards from the Minister of National Education. Leaving this matter without consequences will expose us to ridicule and give permission to all those who want to falsely portray Poland in a bad light – not as a victim of German genocide, but as accomplice in these nightmarish crimes! Unfortunately, this lie has many supporters.
Immediately after the scandalous statement was publicized, the video of the conference disappeared from the web. The Ministry explains that there was a “slip of the tongue.” This form of justification for the words is indefensible. However, did Barbara Nowacka not say what she really thinks? Her decisions at the Ministry of National Education point to this. She is the person responsible for the removal from the curriculum of history classes of much of the knowledge about Polish victims of World War II and about Poles who fought against the German and Soviet occupiers.
Even the information about the inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is removed from the core curriculum.
Gone from the core curriculum is the true paragon of virtues, St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a martyr who was thrown into the camp like thousands of other representatives of the Catholic Church in Poland. Before the war, St. Maximilian founded the Niepokalanów (i.e., “Place of the Immaculate”) monastery, where he published Catholic newspapers (including the most popular monthly in Poland called “Knight of the Immaculate”), and from where Radio Niepokalanów broadcasted. The Franciscan founded a missionary outpost in Nagasaki, Japan. His insistence to locate the monastery on the south side of the mountain saved it from destruction by the 1945 atomic bomb. St. Maximilian volunteered to take the place of another prisoner selected for death with the words: “I am a Catholic priest, I am old, I want to die for him, he has a wife and children.” There is no room for him in Barbara Nowacka’s school either.
What seems most wicked, however, is the removal from the high school curriculum of the name of Witold Pilecki, the author of the famous reports on the Holocaust and the criminal practices that were carried out at Auschwitz. Pilecki volunteered to get into the death camp as the Polish underground soldier, deliberately sought that the Germans capture him in a random street round-up of Warsaw inhabitants to be sent to Auschwitz in 1940. His task was to gather intelligence about what was happening in the German camp and to form an in-camp resistance movement called the Union of Military Organization. After over two years in the German camp, Pilecki managed to escape from the camp along with two other prisoners. Pilecki escaped from the camp and served Poland for the rest of his life, including 63 days in the Warsaw Uprising, eventually suffering death at the hands of communist oppressors in 1948.
Ideology instead of science
The Polish youth is being deprived of access to the foundations of Polish identity, and is fed instead with sex education imbued with the ideology of “genderism”, which under the pretext of “health education” aims to teach Polish children about “LGBTQ+,” “cisgender,” or “gender identity.”
We say enough of this! We cannot permit the further depolonization and ideologization of Polish school.
We demand the resignation of Minister Barbara Nowacka, who is responsible for these scandalous reforms!
