Memorial to Jews killed in pogrom is defaced

A MONUMENT to Jewish victims of a wartime pogrom in Poland has been daubed with racist slogans and green swastikas.

The Polish government condemned the attack, the latest in a series of racist outrages targeting Jewish, Muslim and Lithuanian communities in the east of the country.

At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbours in a barn in the 1941 pogrom in the eastern town of Jedwabne. The site was later turned into a memorial.

“On Wednesday a police patrol ran into the damaged site. We immediately started an investigation,” said Andrzej Baranowski, police spokesman in the nearby city of Bialystok.

Vandals also smeared a wall surrounding the memorial with signs saying “I’m not sorry for Jedwabne” and other offensive jibes. They obscured the Hebrew and Polish signs on the memorial itself with paint.

“This is a perfect example of vandalism and stupidity, but we don’t know the exact motives yet,” Mr Baranowski added.

All the recent anti-Semitic and xenophobic incidents were probably perpetrated by the same people, Poland’s interior ministry claimed this week.

Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski condemned the vandalism as “alien to Polish tradition”.

“In Polish society there can be no place for allowing such acts, even if they involve only small groups of extremists … I am convinced that those responsible will soon be found and will suffer the legal consequences of their actions,” he said.

Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population of some 2.5 million until the war, when most perished in the Holocaust which claimed more than six million Jewish lives.