Pro-Palestinian activists and Israeli left-wing demonstrators vandalized the Warsaw Ghetto last Sunday.
Pro-Palestinian activists sprayed “Liberate All Ghettos” in Hebrew and “Free Gaza and Palestine” in English on one of the original walls in the ghetto. A Palestinian flag was also hung from the wall.
One of the Israelis involved in the vandalism, Yonatan Shapira, a former Israeli Air Force pilot and harsh critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, said he joined a group of Palestinian and Polish activists at a demonstration where they spray painted the walls.
“My action is not controversial,” Shapira told Israel’s Army Radio on Monday. “I am not saying there is a comparison with the monstrosity of Nazi death camps, but I am saying we must talk about the silence in Israel and the world when people are confined in a ghetto-like place.”
Speaking during the demonstration last week, Shapira said, “Most of my family came from Poland and many of my relatives were killed in the death camps during the Holocaust. When I walk in what was left from the Warsaw Ghetto, I can’t stop thinking about the people of Gaza who are not only locked in an open air prison but are also being bombarded by fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones, flown by people whom I used to serve with before my refusal in 2003.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded to the incident by demanding that the Warsaw municipality remove the paint as soon as possible.
Deputy Minister for Pensioner Affairs Dr. Leah Nass said, “This vile act demonstrates how imperative commemoration is these days, in order to prevent Holocaust denial. I plan to contact the authorities in Poland to prosecute the law-breakers and anarchists.”
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. Established by he German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940, the ghetto reached a population of over 400,000, or 30 percent of the city’s population. Despite the number of people forced to live in the ghetto, it accounted for only 2.4 percent of the space of the city.
Over 100,000 people died in the ghetto from disease, starvation and random killings. Between July 23 and September 21, 1942, about 254,000 of the ghetto’s residents were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp where they were murdered.
