Polish museum ignores furor, keeps naked Auschwitz video

Jewish officials are furious over a video installation at a Polish museum showing naked men and women playing a game of tag in a gas chamber, which remains on display despite promises it would be removed.

“Game of Tag” (NSFW link), made in 1999 by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, is part of an exhibition titled “Poland – Israel – Germany. The experience of Auschwitz,” which opened in May at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK), about the former Nazi death camp’s impact on public discourse. The exhibition was endorsed and sponsored by the Israeli Embassy in Poland.

After drawing considerable criticism from Jewish advocacy groups, the embassy called for the video’s removal, and the Polish museum said it would accede to the demand.

“On behalf of MOCAK, I am informing that Artur Żmijewski’s video ‘Game of tag,’ considered controversial and offending, is no longer displayed at the exhibition,” Justyna Kuska, the museum’s spokesperson, told The Times of Israel in June.

“Instead we are presenting information about the artwork including our curatorial commentary as well as the link to the video which is officially accessible on the web,” she added.

But the museum only partially followed up on the decision, putting it behind an enclosure with a warning.

“From the 12th to 17th June (as the booth was under construction) the work was presented by means of a link to the website on which the film could be seen. Since 17th June the video captioned with the warning ‘This work might be considered controversial and is intended for adult viewers’ has been presented in a specially secluded area,” a museum official said in an email Tuesday.

“The audience can decide for themselves whether they wish to see it or not,” she added.

But Jewish officials say closing off the display isn’t enough.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said it is “simply incomprehensible” that the video is being shown in Poland, where Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews and non-Jews.

World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder also urged the MOCAK to immediately remove the film, which he said “causes extraordinary anguish to Auschwitz survivors and many others to whom the Holocaust is not a remote event in history, but rather serves as an enduring warning about the dangers of anti-Semitism, racial hatred and xenophobia.”

The Museum has rejected protests by Jewish leaders. “To read this film as an insult to the victims of the concentration camps we feel is to misinterpret it,” MOCAK director, Dr. Maria Anna Potocka, said last month.

Potocka said “it is not possible – and perhaps best avoided – to portray realistically what went on inside gas chambers, whether physically or emotionally. Any such attempts end in fatal pathos. An image that approximates the reality can only be sensed by our imagination.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.