Polish Foreign Ministry denounces act of vandalism against Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument

The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned, Friday, November 15, an act of vandalism against the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, perpetrated by unknown persons who daubed it with red and black paint.

A year after invading Poland, in 1940, the Nazis sealed off a district of Warsaw and crowded nearly half a million Jews into three square kilometers, in order to exterminate them through hunger and disease, and deported some. more than 300,000 to gas chambers. The insurrection broke out on April 19, 1943. It was the largest and best known event of Jewish urban resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War.

“Last night, the Warsaw Ghetto monument was vandalized”wrote earlier Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Poland, Yacov Livne, in a message on the social network X, accompanied by a photo of the soiled monument.

“In-depth investigation”

An Agence France-Presse photographer dispatched to the site was able to observe that workers were removing paint from this monument located on the grounds of the former ghetto, opposite the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, not far from the center of the Polish capital.

Yacov Livne called on the Polish authorities to “condemn this act, find the guilty and bring them to justice”. The Polish Foreign Ministry condemned “firmly the act of vandalism” committed against the “symbol of memory of the victims of the Shoah and of Jewish resistance against German Nazism”

According to the press release published on the ministry's website, “Such acts constitute an attack on the history and values ​​that unite us as a society”. Polish Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak announced a “thorough investigation” on the “desecration” of the monument.

This act has not been claimed.