WARSAW (World News) - Poland demanded an apology from the White House after President Barack Obama spoke of a "Polish death camp" while anouncing an award to a Polish resistance fighter for alerting the world to the Nazi Holocaust, largely perpetrated on Polish soil.
The matter is a delicate one in Poland, which suffered Nazi occupation during World War Two and has long campaigned against suggestions it bore any responsibility for the slaughter of some 6 million European Jews.
"The White House will apologies for the outrageous mistake," Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on his twitter account on Tuesday night. "It's a pity that ignorance and incompetence overshadowed such a momentous ceremony."
In his first early comments on Wednesday, Sikorski added he was not suspecting Obama of ill will and blamed the "grave mistake" on the White House's speech writers and press service.
Following the ceremony in Washington, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk demanded immediate clarification from Sikorski and the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw.
Tusk is due to speak on th e matter later on Wednesday.
The posthumous award for Jan Karski was to honor him for bringing some of the first eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust to the outside world, after he was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi camp.
Karski travelled to London, Washington and elsewhere urging action to prevent the mass extermination of Jews - largely in vain.
Israel's Yad Vashem institute has awarded Karski the Righteous Among the Nations title for his efforts to aid Jews, and to more than 6,300 other Poles - more than any other single nationality, despite the fact that Poland's history is littered with anti-Semitism.
Some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before 1939. Most perished during World War Two, among nearly 6 million Polish deaths in totals.
A new museum dedicated to the history of P olish Jews is now under construction in the capital Warsaw.
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