A newspaper in Florida has a report on a group of Holocaust survivors seeking historical recognition — and many are not whom you’d expect.

They are Polish Catholics, who were also sent to the camps:

Michael Preisler’s arm still bears the signs of Auschwitz. He was number 22213.

Preisler doesn’t fit the most common perception of Holocaust victims. He is a Polish Catholic, a group that scholars say represent 1.9-million of those killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Some scholars also estimate that a million Polish Catholic soldiers died in battles with German and Russian armies. As Holocaust survivors die, Polish Catholics across the country are stepping up efforts to get their stories and those of their ancestors reflected in history books, museums and in the larger public’s knowledge.

Time is running out, they say.

“There are very few victims left,” said Preisler, 88, who lives in New York City. “I’m fighting for the truth.”

In the Tampa Bay area, Wallace M. West has led the crusade for recognition for a dozen years. As head of the American Institute of Polish Culture in Pinellas Park, he tries to educate the public about Polish contributions to society, including their role in the Holocaust.

“When you talk about the Holocaust, most people aren’t aware that the Polish people suffered as well,” said West, 86, a retired museum director who also visits local schools. “It doesn’t lessen the fact that Jews suffered greatly and hideously. But attention ought to be paid to the fact that others suffered too.”

Those who have taken up the cause find their work fraught with challenges. They fight a public knowledge gap as wide as the Grand Canyon. For some Polish Catholic activists, there are persistent worries about being labeled anti-Semitic for demanding recognition for their own heritage in an event widely associated with Jews alone.

“There’s a certain fear that you’ll be misunderstood,” said T. Ron Jasinski-Herbert, editor of the Polonia Media Network, a media distribution service based in Chicago. “Every time I write an editorial about any of this type of thing, I always put a caveat in there that nobody is attacking the Jews. What we’re trying to do is tell our story.”

Anthony Cheslock, a Polish Catholic and bay area dentist, contends that publicly funded institutions and school systems have a responsibility to make their Holocaust teachings more inclusive because they receive public money.

“All we want is proper credit and not to be footnoted and ushered off the stage,” Cheslock said. “It’s like we’re in the second tier.”

As defined by historians and scholars, the Holocaust is the Nazi’s systematic attempt to murder Europe’s Jews. Six-million Jews died as a result of Adolf Hitler’s campaign. Five-million other people perished as well.

Hitler’s other targets included Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally challenged and physically deformed. Poles caught Hitler’s attention because they were deemed ideologically dangerous, particularly the thousands of intellectuals and Catholic priests who could mobilize resistance among the masses, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Anna Adamczyk’s grandmother faced death at the hands of the SS, the Nazis’ special police, for hiding Jews in her family’s barns and underground tunnels.

“I always tell what I know,” said Adamczyk, who lives in Palm Harbor. “Am I going to change what’s written in history? I can’t do that alone.”

The article at the link has more on what this group is trying to achieve — and the uphill battle they face.

Photo: Michael Preisler, from the day he was processed at Auschwitz. From Frank Milewski, via the St. Petersburg Times