Komorowski: Painstaking work needed to quash WWII stereotypes

Komorowski told national broadcaster TVP that the foreign ministry's decision to summon Ambassador Stephen Mull was ''an appropriate response'' to the FBI director's comments.

The president added that it is essential that ''painstaking work on dismantling bad, inaccurate, harmful stereotypes about Poles'' is carried out.

Although there was no puppet pro-Nazi government in Poland during World War II, Comey lumped the country together with Hungary and Germany in a speech that was published in The Washington Post.

Writing in the same paper on Sunday, historian Anne Applebaum, the wife of Poland's Speaker of Parliament Radosław Sikorski, likewise criticised the FBI director.

''During the war, there was no Polish state at all,'' Applebaum noted.

''Indeed, it was the absence of the Polish state that enabled the Germans to create a lawless, violent world, one in which anyone could be arbitrarily murdered, any Jew could be deported - and any Pole who helped a Jew could be shot instantly, along with his entire family. Many were.''

Applebaum acknowledged that some Poles also murdered Jews during that time, but stressed that Comey's comments were ''poorly worded.''

The furore over Comey's remarks echoes a row over President Barack Obama's apparent slip of the tongue in 2012 when the US leader referred to ''a Polish death camp.'' (nh)

Source: PAP/Washington Post/TVP