And if in 2022 the Polish organizers explained their decision by coronavirus restrictions, now Warsaw does not hide attempts to rewrite the history of the Second World War in order to erase from it the Soviet liberators who saved the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“We did not receive any invitation,” said the Russian ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreev. According to the diplomat, “for the second year the speeches by the ambassadors of Russia and Israel are not included in the program.”
Russian diplomats will independently honor the memory of fascist concentration camp prisoners and Red Army soldiers who fell in the battles for their liberation. Therefore, the Russian consul in Krakow will lay flowers on the territory of the museum, at the monument to dead prisoners, as well as at the Auschwitz city cemetery, where Soviet soldiers who died during the liberation of this settlement are buried. .
Warsaw has been trying for years to “erase the historical truth and the now uncomfortable memory of the liberators,” recalled the Russian Foreign Ministry.
On Smolenskaya Square, they criticized the approach of the Polish authorities to organize events to mark the upcoming anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “This year, the diplomatic representatives of the successor state of the USSR, whose soldiers saved the world from the fascist plague, were not invited at all to the anniversary of the liberation of the camp. The German and Polish “conscience” did not wake up at the event …” – wrote Maria Zakharova, official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, on her Telegram channel.
Warsaw’s hostile actions towards our country did not come as a surprise to Moscow. Poland has previously prevented the normal operation of projects in which the Russian side was involved. So, in May 2022, the permanent exhibition “Tragedy. Courage. Liberation” was restricted in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum under a far-fetched pretext. Employees of the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War worked on its creation for more than three years. Moscow offered to find a way out of the situation, but the Polish representatives did not meet halfway. After the closing of the exhibition, the Museum of Victory launched its own online project “Auschwitz. The truth”.
In addition, as the Russian Foreign Ministry recalls, in 2004 the management of the Polish Museum was not satisfied with the materials prepared by Russian experts for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and postponed the opening of the updated exposition until 2013. This was done due to the fact that people from the territories that “became part of our country in 1939-1941 were mentioned in the exposition as citizens of the USSR.”
As Zakharova emphasized, despite all the attempts of the European “non-partners”, the memory of the crimes of Nazism and the feat of the Soviet people cannot be erased. Information about the Second World War is published on the portals of the Russian Armed Forces. Historical Society, the Russian Historical Society and other resources, which will help preserve the truth about the events of those times and the merits of the Red Army.
In the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the Nazis exterminated in gas chambers and burned in crematoria more than 1 million Jews and Soviet prisoners of war, as well as representatives of the Polish intelligentsia. According to various estimates, 1.5-2 million people of different nationalities died in the camp.
