Mosberg, who died in September at the age of 96, has been decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit, a high Polish state award, news agencies reported.
The decoration ceremony took place at the Polish consulate in New York on Thursday, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In a letter to the attendees, Duda wrote about Mosberg: “Above all, I will remember his openness, his smile and his direct manner, the extraordinary firmness and inner strength with which he demanded justice and truth about the tragic fate of Jews and Poles during World War II.”
The Polish president hailed the late Holocaust survivor’s “great integrity, courage and spirit,” adding that Mosberg’s "activism was driven by his conscience, by the aim to honour the victims of atrocities and to help ensure peace and good fate for future generations.”
Mosberg’s daughter Caroline received the award conferred on her father from Poland’s Consul General in New York, Adrian Kubicki, according to officials.
Guests at the ceremony included Mosberg’s relatives, Poland’s envoy to the United Nations, Krzysztof Szczerski, and members of the Jewish diaspora, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Prisoner of Nazi German death camps
Born on January 6, 1926, in the southern Polish city of Kraków, Mosberg was a prisoner of Nazi German concentration camps in Płaszów, on the outskirts of Kraków, and in Mauthausen. Most of his family perished in the Holocaust.
He miraculously survived the war, and, after a brief period in Poland, moved to Belgium, where he married and subsequently relocated to the United States. He became a successful real estate developer in New Jersey and remained active in Holocaust commemoration until the end of his life.
'Outstanding services to Polish-Jewish dialogue’
In June 2019, the Polish president awarded Mosberg with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his ”outstanding services in the development of Polish-Jewish dialogue and the dissemination of knowledge about the role of Poles in saving Jews.”
Mosberg took part several times in the annual March of the Living at the site of the former Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz.
In 2021, he criticised a New Yorker article that blamed Poles for “killing 3 million Jews” and in which Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen accused the Polish government of whitewashing the country’s history.
Mosberg wrote: “We cannot accuse Poland or its government of collaboration with the Germans because, at that time, there was no government in Poland. The responsibility for all that happened cannot be attributed to Polish society.”
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, niezalezna.pl, wpolityce.pl