Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
POLICE AND PROSECUTORS in Poland are investigating graffiti in English and German that appeared on multiple buildings at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, the site of the former Nazi German death camp.
A museum guard found the graffiti sprayed on nine wooden barracks in an area where there is no CCTV monitoring, museum authorities said.
Police said they were seeking the person or people responsible for vandalising a historic object, a crime that carries a prison sentence of up to eight years.
Court experts would determine if the content of the graffiti was anti-Semitic, according to Malgorzata Jurecka, a police spokesperson in the town of Oswiecim.
If they decided it was, the perpetrators could also face hate crime charges punishable by three years in prison.
Museum officials characterised some of the graffiti as anti-Semitic and echoing phrases used by Holocaust deniers. They have appealed to witnesses for help in the investigation.
Officials from the museum and Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial condemned the vandalism as an affront to the memory of the 1.1 million people who are believed to have died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which Nazi Germans operated in occupied Poland between 1940 and 1945.
“This incident, at such a major and significant site of the atrocities of the Holocaust, constitutes an attack not only on the memory of the victims, but also on the survivors and any person with a conscience,” Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said in a statement.
“It is also yet another painful reminder that more must be done to raise awareness about the Holocaust and to educate the public and the younger generation regarding the dangers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and distortion,” Dayan said.
Some 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others died in the gas chambers or from hunger, disease and forced labour at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The site was turned into a museum and memorial not long after the Second World War ended. In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, it had more than two million visitors.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
If it’s one thing Iarnrod Eireann are good at, it’s cancelling services
@pkunzip doom2.zip: nonsense, while you’ll get people nagging on about rail services reduced on the hottest weekend in August, its more likely been planned months in advance based on annual August footfalls.
It would be too costly to cancel the works now because you have contractors who will still have to be paid, probably overtime for company staff and then the price of doing it all again
@pkunzip doom2.zip: They are upgrading the line or did you not read the article. That section of line is the oldest in the country and as DART+ is being rolled out there will be work needed across the entire commuter network.
So they have to close the line and they choose the slowest weekends to do so.
@Gary Kearney: did you read my comment?
But they were saying essential works are carried at night and this prevents from extending services to late at nights so that a better service could be provided to the public.
have your say