Dozens of Polish far right nationalists have gathered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to protest at the same time as officials and survivors marked the 74th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
The two parties gathered in different parts of the camp, now an open-air museum, and did not encounter each other on Sunday.
It was the first time the far right has held a protest at Auschwitz at the annual event, which is also International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and other government officials were joined in prayer by some of the last remaining survivors of the death camp.
In another location at the site, far right protesters wrapped in Polish flags, some of them stamped with the words “Polish Holocaust”, laid flowers and sang the Polish national anthem.
“The Jewish nation and Israel is doing everything to change the history of the Polish nation,” said Piotr Rybak of the Polish Independence Movement, who led Sunday’s protest.
“Polish patriots cannot allow this.”
The protest comes at a time of surging anti-Semitism in parts of Europe and as critics accuse Poland’s conservative PiS government of trying to build a nationalist sense of grievance among Poles by seeking to minimise Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
Read the report from the Herald Sun (Reuters).