The words "Jude Raus," meaning "Jews Out," were discovered Wednesday at the Anielewicz Mound in Warsaw, a monument to commander Mordechai Anielewicz and his fighters.
Police are investigating the vandalism to the monument on Mila Street, which was a busy thoroughfare in Jewish Warsaw before the Holocaust.
Anielewicz and the Jewish Combat Organization made their plans and directed operations from a bunker at 18 Mila St. The Germans surrounded the bunker on May 7, 1943. Most of the 100 resistance fighters and leaders inside the bunker committed suicide, though a few escaped.
A memorial stone atop the mound recounts the story of the resistance fighters led by Anielewicz.
June, 2013
http://www.timesofisrael.com/memorial-to-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-is-vandalized/
Current plans put the memorial to the Righteous Among Nations next to the centre of Jewish resistance during the uprising, and a new museum on Judaism in Poland. But Poland's Jewish community, while not disputing the justification behind the monument, have asked for it to be placed on the edges of the old ghetto.
"Poland is a large country so there is plenty of capacity for a monument to the Righteous, but let the Warsaw Ghetto remain an inviolate area dedicated to the memory of murdered Jews," Poland's Centre for Holocaust Research wrote in an open letter.
The problem over the memorial touches on the sensitive history surrounding the uprising.
On April 19, 1943, having witnessed the daily deportation of thousands of Jews to death camps, Jewish insurgents launched a defiant act of resistance against Nazi rule in the full knowledge they faced defeat and death. They held out for almost a month, and their bravery became an inspiration for Jews around the world.
But for some in Poland the concentration of attention on the Jewishness of the battle has side-lined the efforts of Christian Poles who risked their lives to smuggle weapons into the ghetto and people out. They feel these efforts deserve greater recognition.
"What we have here is almost a competitive bidding between the Polish and Jewish communities over the scale of their martyrdom in the Second World War," said Doctor August Grabski, from Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute.
The dispute over where to honour Christian Poles who tried to save Jews from the clutches of the Holocaust comes just days before Poland prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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