Swastika on plaque at Holocaust memorial
Photo: Reuters
Israel decries Holocaust desecration in Poland
Ambassador Rav-Ner says desecration of Holocaust memorial at site of former labor camp in Plaszow 'disgrace to Jews and to Poles who risked their lives to save them'
Israel's ambassador to Poland on Sunday deplored the desecration of a Holocaust memorial in southern Poland and criticized world leaders who deny Israel's right to exist.
"This is a disgrace not only to all Jews but also to the Just Poles who risked their lives to save them," Zvi Rav-Ner told a gathering of some 1,000 Poles and Jews on the site of Nazi Germany's former forced-labor camp in Plaszow on the outskirts of Krakow.
On Saturday, vandals used red paint to deface the memorial with anti-Semitic slogans including "Jude Raus" (Jews Out) and "Hitler Good". A granite plaque in memory of the "tortured, murdered and incinerated" was daubed with a large swastika.
The ambassador was attending the 67th anniversary of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, when German soldiers marched its 6,000 inhabitants at gunpoint to Plaszow, a distance of some three kilometers (about two miles).
The Plaszow camp was the setting of US film director Steven Spielberg's movie "Schindler's List" about a German industrialist who saved his Jewish workers from annihilation.
At Plaszow many of the sick, elderly and very young were killed while the remaining Jews were transported to Auschwitz some 50 km (30 miles) away.
"Unfortunately, there are also presidents of countries who claim that this (the Holocaust) did not occur, that there was no Auschwitz, that it's time to liquidate the Jewish state," the ambassador added.
He did not mention any country by name but Iranian Presiedent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called the Holocaust a myth and questioned Israeli's right to exist.
Krakow's municipal anti-graffiti squad removed the anti-Semitic inscriptions in time for Sunday's ceremony.
