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To mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, a ceremony will take place in Poland on January 27, 2020. But another event is to bring together dozens of heads of state and government four days earlier in Jerusalem. A controversy comes to mark the preparation of this commemoration: the Polish president announced that he would not take part in this event.
With our correspondent in Jerusalem, Guilhem Delteil
The Israeli president, host of this ceremony, hoped to make these commemorations a moment of international mobilization in the face of the increase in anti-Semitic acts in the world. The event will combine memories of the Holocaust and the fight against anti-Semitism. But the boycott of the Polish president came to break the consensus supposed to surround these commemorations.
Andrzej Duda believes that it is in Poland, on the Holocaust, that such commemorations should take place. But the Polish president especially did not appreciate not being invited to speak at the ceremony planned in Jerusalem.
A sensitive subject in Poland
" How is it possible that those who speak are the presidents of Germany, Russia and France, whose governments then sent people, Jews, to the concentration camps ", he was indignant, affirming that Poland had never collaborated with the Nazis. " It is a distortion of reality, " he judges.
The memory of the Second World War is a sensitive subject in Poland. Warsaw was recently indignant at the words of Vladimir Putin attributing to Poland a responsibility in the outbreak of the conflict.
But Polish relations with Israel also became strained after Warsaw adopted in 2018 a law criminalizing the mention of a Polish responsibility in Nazi crimes.
► Poland amends controversial Holocaust law