A group of Holocaust survivors on Thursday condemned the destruction of a memorial site commemorating the Jewish victims of a pogrom in the village of Jedwabne.
Elan Steinberg, Vice-President of American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said the recent desecration of the site where Jews were killed by their neighbors during World War II was a disgrace and called on Poland to find the culprits.
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He added: “In erecting the Jedwabne memorial Poland demonstrated its determination to confront its anti-Semitic past; by its swift reaction to these vandals it will demonstrate its commitment to fight hate in the present. This is the challenge Poland faces."
Earlier in the day Polish police said unknown vandals had defaced a
monument to victims of a World War Two attack against Jews in Poland,
covering it with racist inscriptions and swastikas in green paint.
At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in a barn
in the 1941 pogrom in the eastern town of Jedwabne. The site was later
turned into a memorial.
Vandals also smeared a wall surrounding the memorial with signs saying
"I'm not sorry for Jedwabne" and "They were highly flammable." They
obscured the Hebrew and Polish signs on the memorial itself with paint.
All the recent anti-Semitic and xenophobic incidents were probably
perpetrated by the same people, Poland's interior ministry said this
week, and they are all under investigation by the Bialystok police.