Poland defamed with one word

YOUR ARTICLE ''Files uncover Nazis' trail of death" (Page A1, May 7) would be without blemish if not for the wording ''Polish death camps" in one of the paragraphs. You certainly must agree that this phrase, through which the reporter may have tried to refer to the camps on the Polish territory occupied then by the Third Reich of Nazi Germany, is very ambiguous.

For years we have continued fighting this false simplification, or ''mental shortcut," which takes the blame off German Nazism and puts it on others.

We have been doing it to pay homage to 6 million citizens of the occupied Poland murdered by the insanity of Hitler and his henchmen: 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Polish Christians.

It is documented, for example, that the so-called Auschwitz I camp was initially built by Germans to annihilate the cream of the crop of Poland. It was only after the Wannsee conference that they extended it to create the death complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was to methodically exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The subject here is one innocent adjective: ''Polish." But this short word may denote putting the blame for the most atrocious crime of genocide in human history on a wrong nation.

KRZYSZTOF W. KASPRZYK
Consul General of Poland in New York