Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki used the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday to accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of building “new camps” while waging war against Ukraine.
“On the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, let us remember that to the east Putin is building new camps,” Morawiecki said on Facebook. “Solidarity and consistent support for Ukraine are effective ways to ensure that history does not come full circle.”
He did not elaborate on his accusation against Russia, though it echoed a claim made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last year.
In an address in October, Zelensky spoke of Olenivka, “a concentration camp where our prisoners are kept”.
UN investigators also said last year they had documented more than 400 arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances by Russian forces in Ukraine.
Poland marked yesterday the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the site of the former camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim.
Attendees included religious leaders, Holocaust survivors and Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish husband of US Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial had earlier said that Russia had not been invited to this year’s commemoration given its “aggression against a free and independent Ukraine”.
The museum denounced the Russian offensive as a “barbaric act” on the day Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 last year.
The director of the Auschwitz Memorial also compared the deaths of people in Ukraine to the suffering in World War II.
“Similar sick megalomania, similar lust for power, and similar-sounding myths about uniqueness, greatness, primacy... only written in Russian,” Piotr Cywinski said in an address to an audience including Holocaust survivors. “Innocent people are dying en masse in Europe, again.”
“Wola district in Warsaw, Zamojszczyzna, Oradour and Lidice today are called Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Mariupol and Donetsk,” he added, referring to places where mass killings took place in World War II and sites where Ukraine and its allies accuse Russian forces of committing atrocities.
Russia denies targeting civilians.
It calls the war a “special military operation” triggered by Kyiv’s increasingly close ties with the West, which Moscow says imperil its security.
Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6mn European Jews, 1mn of whom died at the camp between 1940 and 1945 along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.
Set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in 1940, at first to house Polish political prisoners, it became the largest of the extermination centres where Adolf Hitler’s plan to kill all Jews was put into practice.
The camp was liberated by the Soviets’ Red Army on January 27, 1945.
In a post on Telegram on Thursday, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the West of trying to rewrite history and said “the memory of the horrors of Nazism and the Soviet heroes-liberators cannot be erased”.
