U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been invited by a member of the Polish parliament to visit concentration camps in Poland that were used during World War II and the Holocaust.
This comes after the congresswoman saying in an Instagram video on Monday that the United States is “running concentration camps on our southern border,” in reference to the Trump administration’s policies regarding illegal immigrants.
“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,” he tweeted.
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“As you should be aware, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi), who led Germany, were responsible for the darkest period in my country’s and our whole continent’s history by devising a chain of concentration camps in order to exterminate those who they believed were subhuman, or a threat to their imperialistic machinations. This included both Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles, and as a result we lost 6 million of our citizens,” wrote Tarczyński.
He then explained that Germany set up the camps in Poland after invading in September 1939.
“It has caused a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must all deal with every single day, and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten and never allowed to happen again,” wrote Tarczyński.
“This is why when someone cheapens the history or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset,” he continued. “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.”
Tarczyński offered Ocasio-Cortez the chance to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek.
Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor were solely death camps, while Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau served as concentration camps with gas chambers.
Ocasio-Cortez has yet to respond to the invitation. Her spokesperson, Corbin Trent, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In her social-media remarks, the freshman congresswoman said she wants to talk to those “who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”
“The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she continued.
Ocasio-Cortez warned, “We are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”
“I don’t use those words lightly,” she continued. “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”
In response to her remarks, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust remembrance museum, tweeted: “@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of “extermination through labor.”
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