A member of Poland’s Parliament wrote an open letter to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, inviting her to visit the sites of Nazi concentration camps in his country.
In his letter, Dominik Tarczyński extended an “olive branch of education” to the New York Democrat, giving her a brief history of the Nazi occupation of Poland and expressing his “distress” about the congresswoman’s comparison of concentration camps to U.S. facilities.
“This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset,” Tarczyński wrote. “I understand that there are heightened tensions in your politics right now, but I would urge severe caution in attempting to leverage phrases such as ‘concentration camp’ for political ends. It will lead nowhere good.”
With this letter, I am formally inviting @AOC to come to Poland,where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies pic.twitter.com/ivOTfmiCfo
— TARCZYŃSKI Dominik (@D_Tarczynski) June 20, 2019
He also invited Ocasio-Cortez to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek so the Democrat could “study the concentration camps here for real” and “see first hand how different it is from [the] immigration processing centers on the U.S. border.” The official Twitter accounts of both the Auschwitz Memorial and Yad Vashem tweeted to her amid the fallout of her comments.
This comes after Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said in a Monday Instagram Live video that the United States is holding immigrants in concentration camps at the southern border.
She has continued to stand by her comments.
This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.
This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis ⬇️https://t.co/2dWHxb7UuL
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
DHS ripped 1000s of children from their parents & put them in cages w inhumane conditions.
They call their cells “dog pounds” & “freezers.”
I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are.
If that makes you uncomfortable, fight the camps – not the nomenclature. https://t.co/eJpJWeYiot
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 19, 2019
“At these camps… over three million human souls were extinguished,” Tarczyński finishes the letter.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has yet to comment on the invitation.
