The Polish nationalist, Piotr Rybak, said his group was protesting the Polish government, accusing it of remembering only murdered Jews and not murdered Poles in yearly observances at Auschwitz.
That accusation is incorrect. The observances at the memorial site pay homage each Jan. 27 to all of the camp’s victims, both Jews and gentiles.
Former prisoners placed flowers Sunday at an execution wall at Auschwitz. They wore striped scarves that recalled their uniforms, some with the red letter “P,” the symbol the Germans used to mark them as Poles.
A new study released in recent days by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the Azrieli Foundation found that 52 per cent of millennials in Canada cannot name even one concentration camp or ghetto and 62 per cent of millennials did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
The past year in Poland has also seen high emotions triggered by a Holocaust speech law that criminalizes blaming the Polish nation for the crimes of Nazi Germany, something that sparked a diplomatic crisis with Israel and a surge of a surge of anti-Semitic hate speech.
Czarek Sokolowski contributed reporting from Oswiecim, Poland.