Warsaw celebrates the anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto
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Warsaw (AFP) – Hundreds of people marched in Warsaw on Friday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Nazi liquidation of its Jewish ghetto, with the war in Ukraine giving the event new resonance.
The procession passed by the place where Jews were deported from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp in central Poland in 1942, an operation that claimed 260,000 lives.
The marchers wore symbolic ribbons bearing the names of the deportees.
This year’s march was dedicated to the theme of victims of deportations and forced displacement, as millions of Ukrainians fled their homes due to the Russian invasion on February 24.
Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said at the ceremony that the ghetto represented a “division” between its inmates, portrayed as bad, and the “good people” who lived outside.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “has once again tried to divide people. Every time I hear people talking about a division between good and evil, it’s a red flag for me,” he said. -he declares.
Nazi Germany created the Warsaw Ghetto – the largest of its kind during World War II – in 1940 to hold nearly half a million Jews during its occupation of Poland.
Residents were crowded into a small neighborhood where disease and hunger were rampant, before a decree announcing the start of the liquidation of the ghetto arrived on July 22, 1942.
Within three months, 260,000 people – a quarter of Warsaw’s population – were deported to Treblinka and killed in the Holocaust.
© 2022 AFP