The Polish community in the United States is outraged by a plan to honour Josef Stalin by placing his bust on a pedestal at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.
According to William McIntosh, the director of the Bradford museum, which is coordinating the project, the Soviet dictator deserves to be acknowledged alongside Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt has he was an ally of the US after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
The plans have met with protests from Polish war veterans in New York. President of the Kosciuszko Foundation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Storozynski described the plans as a ‘misguided move’ that “will haunt millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, etc. whose families were massacred by this Soviet tyrant. Stalin's killing machine slaughtered more people than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did.”
Storozynski writes in an article at the Huffington Post web site: “Hitler and Stalin were allies and started World War II in 1939 by both attacking Poland at the same time. (…) Stalin only gave lip service to the allies so that they would attack Nazi Germany on the Western front. Stalin did not liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis in 1945…”
The President of the Kosciuszko Foundation has called on Poles living in the United States to address protest letters to the director of the Bradford Museum.
He also said that letters of protest should be sent to President Barack Obama in view of the fact that the director of the Bradford Museum is lobbying Congress to make his museum part of the National Park Service, so that it can receive federal tax dollars. (mk)