YAHOO----US President Barack Obama's description of a Nazi German Holocaust site as a "Polish death camp" shocked Poland, whose leaders insist the record be set straight 67 years after World War II.
Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a "Polish death camp." The White House later said the president "misspoke" and expressed "regret".
The linguistic faux pas
overshadowed Obama's posthumous award of the highest US civilian honor,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews.
Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday Obama's words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just "regret".
"I am convinced that our American
friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple
expression of regret from the White House spokesman -- a reaction more
inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors," Tusk told
reporters in Warsaw.
"Today, this is a problem for the reputation of the United States," the prime minister said.
Poland's anti-communist icon Lech
Walesa meanwhile termed Obama's error a "golden occasion" to set the
historical record straight.
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