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Russian exhibition closed at Auschwitz museum · 2007-04-05 16:29
Museum authorities at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp have closed a Russian exhibition after Moscow changed it to describe eastern European citizens as Soviet, Mosnews reported.
The exhibiton was to be open at the original Auschwitz camp set up by the Nazi occupiers on the outskirts of the southern Polish town of Oswiecim.
Museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt told the reporters, that the row was over how Russia had labeled territories and populations that fell under Moscow's control after Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin carved up the region under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.
Citizens of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as inhabitants of former Polish and Romanian territories, were described as "Soviet" victims of the Nazis.
“The inhabitants of these regions cannot be considered as citizens of the Soviet Union, because they never gave up their original nationality or willingly adopted Soviet citizenship,” said Mr Mensfelt.
The refusal to open the display at the museum has sparked an angry reaction from Russia. Russian foreign ministry has described the move as “more than bizarre.”
“The memory of the victims of Auschwitz should not be caught up in historical and political speculation,” said the ministry in a statement.
But the International Auschwitz Council, which watches over the running of the site, is backing the museum. Council president, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski said that he ruled out “the existence in Poland of an exhibition which misrepresents history based on the criteria of the Stalinist period.”
Bartoszewski, a former prisoner at the camp, is a famous resistance leader who took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis and went on to serve as a foreign minister of Poland in the post-communist era.
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