The director of the Auschwitz Memorial on Friday compared the deaths of people in Ukraine to the suffering in World War II during commemorations marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp by Soviet troops.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial preserves the Auschwitz death camp set up on Polish soil by Nazi Germany during World War II. More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished in gas chambers at the camp or from starvation, cold and disease.
“Similar sick megalomania, similar lust for power, and similar-sounding myths about uniqueness, greatness, primacy…only written in Russian. Innocent people are dying en masse in Europe, again,” Piotr Cywinski said in an address to an audience including Holocaust survivors.
“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 Two and sites where Ukraine and its allies accuse Russian forces of committing atrocities.
Russia denies intentionally 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. Ukraine and Western allies call it an unprovoked invasion to erase the independence of a fellow ex-Soviet republic that Moscow sees as a fake country.
During Friday’s commemorations, Holocaust survivors wearing hats and scarves in the blue and white stripes of camp uniforms and others laid candles on the ruins of a gas chamber.
Read the article by Kuba Stezycki in Sight Magazine.