And suddenly there we were in the midst of another international controversy. We have grown used to this sort of thing here at Maclean’s, whose editor once said, “If you don’t think you’ve gone too far, you haven’t gone far enough.” This can be a pretty rock ’n’ roll place to work. But just this once, the uproar wasn’t one we meant to cause. It’s worth the tale. Here’s the tale.

In our issue of Nov. 16, “Our Biggest Ever” university issue, we carried a long, thoughtful feature by Katie Engelhart about the imminent trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, who is “charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.” Without in any way making excuses for atrocity, Katie’s four-page article managed to air some of the discomfort with trying Demjanjuk, who is 89, visibly feeble, and was not a senior figure in the Nazi mass-murder apparatus in the first place. Sensitive stuff, but Katie is a very good young reporter and that’s not where the trouble lay.

No, the trouble was in three phrases I didn’t even notice when I read the article. Engelhart wrote that Demjanjuk had been mistaken for “a notorious sadist at Poland’s Treblinka death camp.” She refers again to “Poland’s Treblinka death camp,” and notes that Demjanjuk, who was Ukrainian, “served at three Polish camps.” Well, did we ever hear from the Polish Embassy and Polish Canadians after that. The comments under the story when we published it online were furious. The letters were angrier. “This is not acceptable that you spread absurdity that slanders Poland and Polish citizens!!!!” one letter began, under the subject line PROTEST AGAINST YOUR LIE. Almost simultaneously I received a plaintive email from my friend Sylwia Domisiewicz, the press and protocol officer at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa. “I just got bombarded by emails and phone calls from the Polish-Canadian community,” she wrote. We would be getting a letter from the ambassador, she said. To whom should they send it?

I forwarded Sylwia’s email to our senior executive editor, Peeter Kopvillem, who knows a thing or two about murderous foreign occupations, being Estonian. This kicked off a correspondence between Maclean’s and the embassy, and the letter from the ambassador appears elsewhere in these pages. But I’m spending more time on this issue because it is an example of the insistent demands of horrible memory.

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