Poland: Far-right marches in protest at US pressure for Holocaust restitution

Via Times of Israel:

Thousands of Polish nationalists marched to the US Embassy in Warsaw Saturday, protesting that the US is putting pressure on Poland to compensate Jews whose families lost property during the Holocaust.

The protest took place amid a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic hate speech in public life in Poland and it appeared to be one of the largest anti-Jewish street demonstrations in recent times. It also comes as far-right groups are gaining in popularity, pressuring the conservative government to move further to the right.

Protesters, including far-right groups and their supporters, say the United States has no right to interfere in Polish affairs and that the US government is putting “Jewish interests” over the interests of Poland.

Poland was a major victim of Nazi Germany during World War II and those protesting say it is not fair to ask Poland to compensate Jewish victims when Poland has never received adequate compensation from Germany.

“Why should we have to pay money today when nobody gives us anything?” said 22-year-old Kamil Wencwel. “Americans only think about Jewish and not Polish interests.”

The protesters shouted “no to claims!” and “This is Poland, not Polin,” using the Hebrew word for Poland.

Rafal Pankowski, a sociologist who heads the anti-extremist group Never Again, called the march “probably the biggest openly anti-Jewish street demonstration in Europe in recent years.”

One couple wore matching T-shirts reading “death to the enemies of the fatherland,” while another man wore a shirt saying: “I will not apologize for Jedwabne” — a massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors in 1941 under the German occupation.

Among those far-right politicians who led the march were Janusz Korwin-Mikke and Grzegorz Braun, who have joined forces in a far-right coalition standing in the elections to the European Parliament later this month. Stopping Jewish restitution claims has been one of their key priorities, along with fighting what they call pro-LGBT “propaganda.” The movement is polling well with young Polish men.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki echoed the feelings of the protesters at a campaign rally Saturday, saying that it is Poles who deserve compensation.

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Poland: Right-wing newspaper’s front page teaches ‘how to recognize a Jew’

Via Times of Israel:

A right-wing newspaper with national distribution in Poland ran on its front page an article that instructs readers on “how to recognize a Jew.”

The Polish-language weekly, Tylko Polska, or “Only Poland,” lists on its front page “Names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation” and “disinformation activities.”

The text also reads: “How to defeat them? This cannot go on!”

The page also features a headline reading, “Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris.” The reference is to a Holocaust studies conference last month during which Polish nationalists complained that speakers were anti-Polish. That article features a picture of Jan Gross, a Polish-Jewish Princeton University scholar of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and a frequent target of nationalist attacks.

Only Poland is published by Leszek Bubl, a fringe nationalist political candidate and sometime musician who has sung about “rabid” rabbis. The paper was spotted Wednesday at the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, as part of this week’s packet of periodicals.

Michał Kamiński, a conservative lawmaker, protested the article and its presence at the Sejm, Polsat news reported.

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Germany: Anti-Semitic acts reach 10-year peak, police data shows

Via EuroNews:

Anti-Semitic offences rose by almost 10% in Germany last year, according to preliminary data released by police on Wednesday.

Some 1,646 anti-Semitic acts were reported in 2018, according to police, marking their highest level in the past decade. Sixty-two of these acts were violent, wounding 43 people.

The preliminary figures were released at the request of Die Linke left-wing party, and the final study will be published in May.

(...)

In Germany, one of the reasons behind the current jump of antisemitic acts is the rising popularity of the far-right AFD party, said Carsten Nickel, Managing Director of the think tank Teneo.

Since the 2015 migration crisis, Germany has seen a resurgence of far-right sentiment tainted with antisemitism which was impossible just 10 year ago due to German history, Carsten told Euronews.

The far-right's political strategy has been to blame migrants, which come predominantly from Muslim countries, for the resurgence of anti-Jewish hatred in Germany. "Muslim immigration might be part of the story, but I don't think that's the only story," Carsten said.

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Hungary: Magazine publishes anti-Semitic image of Jewish leader on cover

Via JTA:

A Hungarian Jewish leader was pictured on the cover of a pro-government magazine surrounded by images of money.

The image of Andras Heisler, head of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or Mazsihisz, the country’s largest Jewish group, was published late last week on the front page of the Figyelo weekly.

The magazine accuses Heisler and Mazsihisz of accounting irregularities in connection with a state-funded synagogue renovation project in Budapest including a Jewish museum, according to the AFP news service. Mazsihisz denies the allegation.

The cover image “revives centuries-old stereotypes against our community,” the group said in a statement published on its website.

“The appearance on a front cover of such incitement against a religious leader without any factual basis is unprecedented,” the statement said, calling it “deliberate character assassination.”

The cover was published about a day after the Hungarian government pledged to spend $1.7 million every year on projects to combat anti-Semitism in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, according to the AFP.

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France: Court Sentences Antisemite Alain Soral to One-Year Prison Term for Incitement

Via Algemeiner (h/t glykosymoritis):

One of France’s most vocal antisemites, Alain Soral, was sentenced to a year in prison by a criminal court in Paris on Thursday, after he was found guilty of inciting racial hatred in an article that described Jews as “manipulative, domineering and hateful.”

 The offending article was published last March on Soral’s playfully-titled Égalité et Réconciliation (“Equality and Reconciliation”) website — an online home for antisemitic, extreme nationalist and anti-capitalist activists and writers.

 Following the announcement of Soral’s sentence, the French Union of Jewish Students (EUJF) tweeted, “Justice has put a new stop on this little propagandist of hatred.”

...

Originally a communist, the Swiss-born Soral crossed to the far-right National Front (FN) before carving out his own path in 2007. A purveyor of conspiracy theories about “Jewish” and “Zionist” power, Soral has for several years worked closely with Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, an antisemitic propagandist who presents himself as a comedian.

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Greece: Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki sprayed with Swastika

Via Ekathimerini:

Unknown assailants spray-painted a black Swastika on the Holocaust Memorial on the northern port city of Thessaloniki's Eleftherias Square late on Friday or in the early hours of Saturday.

The assailants are believed to have been part of a rally held earlier on Friday by protesters opposed to the name deal Greece signed over the summer with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Local website Voria published photographs of demonstrators in that rally giving the Nazi salute.

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Hungary: Jobbik Deputy Leader to Step Down After Anti-Semitic Recording Surfaces

Via Hungary Today:

Jobbik deputy group leader and parliamentary notary István Szávay announced his immediate resignation on Thursday following the release of recordings containing anti-Semitic comments and details of an alleged assault.

On Wednesday, Hir TV presented a sound recording of Szávay privately informing fellow party members at a spring congress that he had verbally and physically assaulted a Jewish woman in a pub the previous day. According to Szávay, the woman initiated the conflict:

“She was yelling, ‘Nazis are stinking here,’ and I just knocked her out, dirty Jew, pakk, just like this.”

He admitted that the recording and the anti-Semitic comments were authentic, however, he insisted that he did not actually physically harm the woman.

In a message posted to his Facebook page on Thursday, Szávay said he informed group leader Márton Gyöngyösi about his resignation, which was accepted, and announced that he will remain a member of the Parliament.

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Poland: Will they „hang a Jew” under the Israeli embasy? Police prepares for Saturday

Translated from Gazeta Wyborcza (many thanks!):

"You know me, it’s going down. I promise I’ll put up a scaffold under the Israeli embassy and I’ll hang a Jew from it” -- this is how Slawomir Dul announces his Saturday demonstration. Our reader calls for action to the ABW [Agency of Internal Security] and the police.

„I’ve been trying to get several forces to notice these men, but they don’t seem to be interested in any kind of intervention. It’s even more puzzling to me since what I have found out about the man who started in the past local election as a candidate for a member of the [city district] council is  shocking. He also invited a man who called for people to join him in „hanging an effigy of a Jew” under the embassy of Israel to appear on his Youtube channel - says Piotr [the name has been changed], our informer.

Candidate for [Warsaw] city district council: „Ukraine needs to be partitioned”

The man who has been accused by our reader is Damian Bieńko, ran in [the last month’s] election for the council of the Praga-Południe district of Warsaw as the No. 1 candidate on the ballot from the Wolność [Freedom] party of Janusz Korwin-Mikke [note: it is a far-right, eurosceptical party, openly anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-women’s rights, racist and often also antisemitic party, the leader is currently an MEP]. He was the head of the Narodowa Wolna Polska organization [National/Nationalist Free Poland] - one of the smallest nationalist organisations, which is notable for its sympathy towards Russia and the Donbas separatists. „Ukraine needs to be partitioned. so that its territories will return to the rightful owners - Donbas to Russia, Lviv to Poland, Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary”, says Bieńko in his online recordings. Currently, he runs a Youtube channel called TWN Telewizja Wolności Narodu [Television of Freedom of the Nation].

On 22nd of November, his guest was Sławomir Dul, a member of Confederacy of Parents. The man has announced a demonstration under the embassy, which is to include a „hanging of an effigy of a Jew”.

Dul has been previously noted for a long court struggle during which he attempted to regain the custody of his children [he held a hunger strike in Piotrkow Trybunalski after having the visitation rights revoked], as well as burning an effigy of Jaroslaw Kaczynski [the leader of the ruling right-wing party] in 2016. It was a way of manifesting his support for Piotr Rybak, who has been sentenced to 10 months of inprisonment after burning an effigy of a Jew in Wroclaw. Dul has said of the judge who sentenced Rybak: „he should be put against a wall and executed by a firing squad.”

In the TWN show, Dul has announced his plans to organise a march from the Ukrainian embassy to the Israeli embassy on December 1st at 12 PM. He invites all the Polish people to join, „from the left and the right alike” - "You know me, it’s going down. I promise I’ll put up a scaffold under the Israeli embassy and I’ll hang a Jew from it,” he says.

Bieńko joins him - „I also invite you. Even if you don’t agree, come, watch the show, maybe you’ll join the troupe.”

KSP: We aren’t downplaying the issue

Our informer has contacted the KSP [Police Headquarter in Warsaw], including the protection of diplomatic posts division, the anti-terrorist division and the homicide division. „The video remains on YouTube though. They aren’t doing anything. I demand blocking it and looking into those people. I’m ashamed that this is going on in Poland,” Piotr says angrily.

Warrant officer Mariusz Mrozek from the Warsaw Police Headquarter assures that the case is known to the police, and that the emails have been noted. „Maybe your informer hasn’t received a response, but we are treating the matter seriously. We are in touch with the city hall. The Office of Security and Crisis Management has informed its Ochota district cell, as this is where the embassy of Israel is located.”

As officer Mrozek says, Dul has attempted to register his demonstration [at the city hall], but the city didn’t approve it, partly because of his YouTube annoucement. Dul has appealed.

„According to the informations I received, the city sent a set of documents to the Ochota district's court, as well as the prosecutor’s office. Still, no matter what the decision will be, we are aware of the fact that some people break the bans. Therefore we are preparing ourselves for everything that might happen on Saturday. We are not downplaying the issue,” adds officer Mrozek.

Poland: In secret recording, PM slams ‘greedy’ Jewish, American hedge fund owners

Via Times of Israel:

Poland’s prime minister was heard making allegedly anti-Semitic remarks in secret recordings from 2013, before he rose to power.

The recordings of Mateusz Morawiecki complaining to friends about “greedy” and rich “Americans, Jews, Germans, Englishmen, and Swiss” that run hedge funds were published Tuesday by the news site Onet.

Part of a corruption scandal, the remarks appeared in a 3-hour recording of Morawiecki, who was then a senior banker, discussing politics and finance with his friends at a prestigious Warsaw restaurant. 

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Ukraine: Jewish activist: Facebook banned me for posting antisemitic graffiti

Via Jerusalem Post:

 Eduard Dolinksy, a prominent Ukrainian Jewish activist, was banned from posting on Facebook Monday night for a post about antisemitic graffiti in Odessa.

Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said he was blocked by the social media giant for posting a photo. “I had posted the photo which says in Ukrainian ‘kill the yid’ about a month ago,” he says. “I use my Facebook account for distributing information about antisemitic incidents and hate speech and hate crimes in Ukraine.”

Be the first to know - Join our Facebook page.


Now Dolinsky’s account has disabled him from posting for thirty days, which means media, law enforcement and the local community who rely on his social media posts will receive no updates.

(...)

Dolinksy says that he has been targeted in the past by nationalists and anti-semites who oppose his work. Facebook has banned him temporarily in the past also, but never for thirty days. “The last time I was blocked, the media also reported this and I felt some relief.

It was as if they stopped banning me. But now I don’t know – and this has again happened. They are banning the one who is trying to fight antisemitism. They are banning me for the very thing I do.”

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Austria: State May Require Jews to Register to Buy Kosher Meat

Via Haaretz:

A regional politician in Austria defended a plan to limit access to kosher meat, conditioning its sale on permits that would be individually issued to observant Jews.

The Wiener Zeitung daily reported Tuesday about the draft decree in the state of Lower Austria, one of nine states that make up the federal Republic of Austria. Gottfried Waldhäusl, the cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Austria who is in charge of animal welfare and several other portfolios, defended the plan as necessary “from an animal welfare point of view.”

Oskar Deutsch, the president of the Jewish Community in Vienna, warned that, in practice, the plan would require compiling a list of Jews, which he called “like a negative Aryan clause,” referencing racist laws passed by Nazi Germany and implemented in Austria after its merger with Germany in 1938. 

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Germany: Less than half of Germans think Jews don't have too much influence in the world

Percentage who didn't answer the question added in brackets.

Via Marcel Dirsus @ Twitter

Anti-semitism in Germany: 

Percentage of people who believe that Jews have too much influence in the world
AfD supporters: 55%     [22%]
Linke supporters: 20%   [30%]     
Green supporters: 17%   [47%]
FDP supporters: 19%     [35%]
SPD supporters: 16%     [37%]
CDU/CSU supporters: 19%   [41%]

(Source: Allensbach/FAZ)

Greece: Argos mayor expelled over anti-Semitic rant

Via ekathimerini (h/t glykosymoritis)

The mayor of the small town of Argos in southern Greece, Dimitris Kambosou, was expelled from the New Democracy party on Friday over anti-Semitic references regarding his counterpart in Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris.

The decision was taken by the conservative leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

In an anti-Semitic rant, Kambosou expressed his dislike of Boutaris over his stance on various national and social issues, adding that “he only gets away with it because he is liked by the Jews.”

“He can say what he wants because he wears the [kippah],” he said.

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UK: Former Liberal leader David Steele compares Israel to apartheid South Africa

In Europe, the Right is as keen as the Left to bash Israel.

Via Jewish News:

Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people has been compared to the old apartheid regime in South Africa by former Liberal leader David Steel.

Lord Steel of Aikwood accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of continuing to treat Palestinian lives “as inferior to their own”. Speaking in the House of Lords, the former president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement expressed hope that the recent “slaughter” during protests at the Gaza border would galvanise global opinion just as the Sharpeville Massacre had in South Africa.   

The shooting dead by police of 69 unarmed people protesting against apartheid laws in 1960 was seen as a turning point in the nation’s liberation struggle.

Lord Steel was also critical of the international community, including successive British governments, which he argued had allowed Israel “to defy the United Nations and trample on the rights of Palestinians”.

The Liberal Democrat peer made his hard-hitting remarks as he opened a debate in the Lords on the situation in the Palestinian territories. 

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Poland: Magazine asks “just how strong is the Jewish lobby?” on its front cover

Via Everyday Antisemitism:

Right wing Polish magazine Do Rzeczy has published an antisemitic issue which features the question “just how strong is the Jewish lobby?” on its front cover.

The weekly right wing magazine was founded in 2013 and represents Christian conservatism in the country.

The article pits the mysterious “Jewish lobby” against Poland, asking “can the Polish government handle it?”. Poland is currently governed by the far right Law and Justice Party, a party infested with antisemitism from the top all the way down to the grassroots.

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Greece: Thessaloniki mayor injured after far-right attack

Tsakalidis was called "slave of the Jews"

Via al-Jazeera (h/t glykosymoritis)

The mayor of Greece's second-largest city was admitted to hospital with injuries after he was set upon by a group of ultra-nationalist demonstrators.

The attack took place in the northern coastal city of Thessaloniki on Saturday during a commemoration marking the killing of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire during the tail end of the World War I.

(...)

Kostas Tsakalidis, a Thessaloniki-based photographer, witnessed the attack while covering the flag-lowering ceremony during Saturday's commemoration.

"A group of people started to shout at him for his opinion on the Macedonian dispute, the LBGTQI community, Turkey, and [nationalist] football clubs," he told Al Jazeera, adding that he had seen many of the assailants at "extreme right protests" in recent months.

"Some people were shouting about Jews because he has had [a] close relationship with the Jewish community over the years."

Tsakalidis explained that Boutaris fell to the ground after being hit, while attackers threw bottles "and other objects" at him. One assailant proceeded to kick the mayor as he lay on the pavement.

Although a group of police officers were located nearby, Tsakalidis said "none of them intervened" to stop the attack. 

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Germany: Distorted antisemitism statistics

Via The Algemeiner (Manfred Gerstenfeld):

The German Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer recently presented the country’s criminal statistics for 2017. These included 1,500 criminal antisemitic acts — about four per day. The minister claimed that 95% of these were motivated by right-wing attitudes. Another source reported that there were 947 antisemitic incidents in Berlin in 2017, an increase of 60% from the year before.

But if right-wing perpetrators of antisemitic acts were so dominant, why did several leading politicians come out in the last few months against Muslim antisemitism? The major public exposure of Muslim hate crimes against Jews in Germany started after the burning of a homemade Israeli flag in Berlin in December 2017. The video of this event went viral around the world.

For many years, Muslim antisemitism has been intentionally ignored and sometimes whitewashed in Germany. Severe criminal cases coming out of parts of this community were treated as “incidents” instead of as a structural problem.

Since last December this has suddenly changed. The Christian Democrat Jens Spahn — the current Minister of Health and former Deputy Minister of Finance — put it clearly. He said that antisemitism in some Muslim countries was omnipresent. He mentioned ongoing incitement in families and mosques. He furthermore stressed that Muslim immigration had brought additional antisemitism to Germany. Spahn called on German Muslim organizations to do their duty and condemn the antisemitic crimes committed by Muslims.

By April, even Chancellor Angela Merkel felt she could no longer remain silent. After yet another antisemitic attack in Berlin, she said that the authorities should act with extreme force against antisemitism — both by Germans and Arabs.

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Poland's Auschwitz Museum Staff Suffer Anti-Semitic Attacks After Holocaust Speech Law

Via Telesur:

In April, the brother of the museum’s director wrote a heartfelt message on Facebook decrying the “50 days of incessant hatred” directed at his brother, Piotr Cywiński.

"For 12 long years he’s worked in one of the most terrible places in the world, in an office with a view of gallows and a crematorium," Cywiński wrote. "Dozens of articles on dodgy websites, hundreds of Twitter accounts, thousands of similar tweets, profanities, memes, threats, slanders, denunciations. It’s enough to make you sick."

Paweł Sawicki, who runs the museum’s social media operation, told the Guardian, "The collateral damage of the dispute is that Auschwitz became a target. We’ve had people saying they were not allowed to have a Polish flag here, or saying that the memory of Poles is not represented here, that the museum is anti-Polish – all of this is untrue, and we had to respond."

The museum, however, continues with a stiff stance, as it continues to regularly interject in Twitter discussions and by publishing a long list of false claims that have been made about the museum, ranging from the issue of Polish flags to the accusation that former Polish prisoners being not invited to a ceremony in January to commemorate the camp’s liberation.

The hate campaign initiated by the Polish nationalists has raised concerns over the pressure exerted on the official guides at the site in southern Poland. 

The Guardian reported that at least two tourist guides suffered abuse,  in one episode a foreign guide was attacked while in another the supporters of a convicted antisemite filmed themselves repeatedly bullying their guide during a visit to the camp in April.

In February, the official responsible for schools in the region in which Auschwitz is located argued that only Poles should be allowed to work as guides at the site. And they should be licensed by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, a state body widely seen as a tool used by the government to impose its preferred historical narratives.

"Foreign, and not Polish narratives reign at Auschwitz. Time for it to stop," wrote Barbara Nowak, who until last year served as a local councilor for Law and Justice. 

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Polish prime minister under fire for Holocaust remarks

Via New Europe:

During a recent conference in Germany, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has come under fire for controversial comments that he made while speaking at a conference in Germany where he accused the Jews of being one the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The Polish government later attempted to clarify Morawiecki‘s remarks, saying Warsaw was in no way denying the Holocaust or hinting at the possibility that Jewish victims were responsible for atrocities committed that resulted in the death of 6 million Jews during World War II.

The Israeli response to Morawiecki’s comments was swift, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoning his Polish counterpart to express his disgust.

Poland has come under fire for the introduction of a law that makes it illegal to accuse the country of being complicit in the Holocaust or referring to Nazi concentration camps as “Polish death camps”.

Morawiecki was asked at Munich Security Conference on April 21 whether he expected a backlash for telling a story about his mother who survived the Holocaust and told him that some Poles had collaborated with the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.

 “Of course it’s not going to be punishable, not going to be seen as criminal, to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators,” Morawiecki replied.

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Poland: Senior Politician in Antisemitic Rant: ‘The Jews Are Not Humans, They Are Animals!’

Via Algemeiner:

The growing trend of antisemitic outbursts among leading Polish politicians and public figures reached new heights this week, when a close ally of the country’s deputy prime minister took to social media to denounce Jews as “animals.”

“Żydzi to nie ludzie to zwierzęta!” – “The Jews are not humans, they are animals!” – an enraged Kazimierz Plotkowski posted on Twitter on Wednesday. The tweet was later deleted, after being captured by several screenshots shared online.

Plotkowski, a successful businessman, is a co-founder and former regional leader of the Polska Razem (“Poland Together”) Party of deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Gowin, and an adviser to the Polish government on energy and mining. The party was founded by Gowin, an outspoken social conservative, in 2013 after he was dismissed from the post of Justice Minister in the previous government.

Following his Twitter outburst, Plotkowski told Polish news outlet NaTemat that he was responding to an unspecified “article” in which Poles were depicted as “pigs who robbed Jews in the ghetto.” However, his original tweet was posted after the museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp announced that it was replacing a small exhibition about a group of Poles executed by the Nazis in 1943 with another about resistance in the camp. Several influential Poles, including historian Adam Cyra, have protested that the decision demeans the suffering of Poles under the Nazis. A spokesperson for the museum told the PAP Polish news agency this week that the new exhibit would show the central role played by Polish inmates in building a resistance movement inside Auschwitz.

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