Poland’s ministry of foreign affairs denounced on Friday the defacement in Warsaw the previous day of a World War II monument commemorating Holocaust victims.
“The MFA strongly condemns the act of vandalism aimed at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes—a symbol of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust and Jewish resistance against German Nazism,” the ministry wrote on X.
“Such acts are an attack on history and the values that unite us as a society,” the post read.
Earlier in the day, Israeli ambassador to Poland Yacov Livne posted a photo on X that showed red paint sprayed on the bottom of the memorial.
Accompanying the picture, Livne wrote: “Yesterday [Thursday] evening the Warsaw Ghetto monument was vandalized. I call on Polish authorities to condemn this, find the culprits [and] bring them to justice. This isn’t the first act of Antisemitic vandalism here. Only determined action will put an end to it.”
On the day the vandalism took place, the Polish Foreign Ministry wrote on its X account: “Poland sends its best wishes of peace and prosperity to the people of Palestine on the occasion of your Independence Day!”
Cleaners were seen removing the paint from the monument on Friday, with police also present at the scene.
The 36-foot-tall memorial was completed in 1948 and was erected in the memory of the Jewish fighters who resisted the Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
The monument is situated in the area formerly part of the Warsaw Ghetto and outside the Polin Museum, built to commemorate the history of Jewish Poles.
Six million Poles died in the Second World War, among them three million Jews.
Following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi authorities crammed the Jewish population into dense ghettos, with the Warsaw Ghetto the largest of these, with around 300,000 to 400,000 Jews.
After more than 250,000 of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to extermination camps. The remaining Jews formed small resistance groups and started smuggling in weapons and building fortifications.
Significantly outstripped in numbers, training and weaponry, the Jews knew that prevailing was impossible, but as Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the uprising, said, their goal was “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.”
The German troops destroyed the ghetto with heavy firepower block by block, killing tens of thousands of Jews.
The revolt lasted for 29 days, from April 19 to May 16, 1943.
