Poland opposes ‘all forms of racism and anti-Semitism,’ deputy PM tells Holocaust forum
Poland opposes “all forms of racism and anti-Semitism,” Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński has told an international Holocaust remembrance conference in Sweden. It is reported by Upmp.news with reference to Polskie radio.
Speaking at the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Anti-Semitism in the Swedish city of Malmö, Gliński said that “numerous efforts are being made to prevent anti-Semitism in all areas of life.”
He added that Poland was participating in international programmes on Holocaust remembrance and prevention of hate crime.
As a result, “the number of hate crimes motivated by anti-Semitism has been gradually reduced since 2018,” Gliński said.
“Raising awareness about the Holocaust” is another of Warsaw’s priorities, he told the conference.
“Poland – a country that witnessed both a thousand-year-old history of peaceful co-existence of Poles and Jews and a painful Holocaust done by the Nazi Germans in our territory – has an obligation to upkeep the memory, safeguard and care for this legacy,” Gliński also said in his address, as quoted by his ministry in English.
And so new institutions and projects are springing up every year to document “the life and culture of Jews in Poland,” Gliński said.
He also told the conference that the Polish culture ministry had spent more than USD 150 million on Jewish-related subsidies for museums, cultural institutions and film productions over the past four years.
These included efforts to spread the story of Witold Pilecki, a World War II resistance leader who exposed Nazi German atrocities in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, he said.
The Malmö conference, delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, brought together some 400 participants from 44 countries, including government ministers and ambassadors, Poland’s state PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)