POLISH CATHOLIC AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR -- NEWS from THE POLISH AMERICAN CONGRESS DOWNSTATE NEW YORK DIVISION 177 Kent Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11222 (516) 352-7125 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 30, 2014MICHAEL PREISLER DEAD IN NEW YORK

NEWS from THE POLISH AMERICAN CONGRESS

DOWNSTATE NEW YORK DIVISION

177 Kent Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11222                                             (516) 352-7125    

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                       September 30, 2014

POLISH CATHOLIC AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR

 MICHAEL PREISLER DEAD IN NEW YORK

 

Photo SS Guards took when Gestapo sent  Michael Preisler to Auschwitz in  October,  1941.

As Past President of the Downstate NY Polish American Congress, Preisler founded the

Holocaust Documentation Committee to fight Holocaust  “distortions and misrepresentations.” 

Richmond Hill,  N.Y. .. “Nowhere else is Holocaust history as distorted and as misrepresented

as it is about Poland.”   These are the words of Michael Preisler, a Polish Catholic survivor of

Auschwitz who came to the United States after World War II and devoted himself to correcting

those distortions and misrepresentations.

Mr. Preisler’s fight for the truth ended with his death on September 29, 2014.  He died just

before his children Eva, and Andrew were to observe his 95^th birthday with him.  He was a

resident of Richmond Hill, New York.

Mr. Preisler is a past president of the Downstate New York Division of the Polish American

Congress who served as such from 1982 to 1990.  As someone who spent 3 ½ years as a

prisoner in the dreaded Auschwitz death camp, he founded the Holocaust Documentation

Committee to challenge the anti-Polish “distortions and misrepresentations” that were so

obvious to him.  He frequently accepted invitations to speak about his personal Holocaust

experiences at various schools and organizations.

Hitler’s SS guards were not the only killers in Auschwitz, according to Mr. Preisler.  What

almost killed him when he was a prisoner there was typhus.  The disease sickened him so

severely that his weight went down to only 85 pounds.  He said he recovered from it

“only with God’s help.”

One of the events that troubled him most during the years before his presidency of the

Downstate Congress ended was the campaign started in 1989 to oust Carmelite nuns from

a convent they occupied at Auschwitz.  He thought the effort was “unjustified.”  He also

found it “shameful” that a commemorative cross erected at a nearby gravel pit also

became another target for removal from its site. 

Preisler often found it difficult to subdue his emotions when he spoke about all of the

Polish prisoners the guards beat so brutally at that gravel pit, including himself.  The

Cross was their special symbol of hope in that place of dreary darkness.  Some of them

would even use their fingernails to try to scratch out a cross in the wood of the bunks

where they slept, he recalled. 

Events in Poland dominated his time after he became president of the Downstate N.Y.

Congress in 1982.  Under Lech Walensa’s leadership, Poland’s first free and

independent trade union, SOLIDARITY looked for support from the West in its

struggle with the Communist system imposed on Poland by Soviet Russia. 

Mr. Preisler responded to the plea by organizing pro-SOLIDARITY demonstrations

on the streets of New York City.  He also led fund raising drives to provide clothing,

medicines and medical supplies and other items a faltering and failing Communist

economy was unable to produce for its citizens.

Prior to his burial at the cemetery of the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in

Doylestown, Pennsylvania on Thursday, October 2^nd, a funeral mass is scheduled

that day for 9:30 a.m. in New York City at St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Church,

101 East 7^th Street in Downtown Manhattan.

The funeral will be directed by Leo F. Kearns, Inc. 85-66 115^th Street (at Myrtle Ave.)

in Richmond Hill, N.Y.  Viewing on Wednesday, October 1 (afternoon and evening).

                                       E N D

Contact:  Frank Milewski

              (516) 352-7125

              pacdny@verizon.net

Note to Editor: Attachment is the photo

                       within this release