In first, Polish airline LOT marks Holocaust Remembrance Day
On flight from Tel Aviv to Warsaw, Poland’s national airline hands out book on Poles who helped save Jews during Nazi occupation
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Poland’s national airline, LOT, commemorated the Jewish genocide for the first time aboard a plane bound from Israel to Warsaw on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The chief attendant of the flight, which took off Friday — the 72nd anniversary of the liberation by the Red Army of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Poland — made a short announcement honoring the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
“This morning’s flight from Tel Aviv to Warsaw will connect Israel and Poland in a special way,” said flight attendant Teresa Wodzinska during an onboard announcement.
Each passenger received a copy of a book recounting the story of non-Jewish Poles who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews, which Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute donated to LOT and the From The Depths Holocaust commemoration group for the occasion.
“This small action is a strong symbol of our two nations becoming closer again,” Jonny Daniels, the founder of From the Depths whose group initiated the gesture, said in a statement about the initiative. Amid the prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment in some parts of the world and the rise of anti-Semitism, he added, “it is beautiful to see that Poland [is] standing by us.”
Separately, dozens of Auschwitz survivors placed wreaths and flowers at the infamous execution wall of the former German death camp at the annual commemoration ceremony held here on Jan. 27.
Many Polish non-Jews were executed there, in addition to 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 1.1 million Jews and 25,000 Roma who were killed in gas chambers, shot and starved to death at the camp.
Poland has been reluctant to accept any responsibility for atrocities carried out against its Jewish population during the Holocaust.
In 2016 the Polish government approved a law to criminalize the use of the phrase “Polish death camps” in reference to Nazi-run extermination camps in occupied Poland.
And during a visit to Israel last week, Polish President Andrzej Duda denied any collective guilt by his country for the atrocities of the Holocaust, saying Poles also suffered under the Nazi regime.
Duda said his countrymen were just as much victims of the Holocaust as the Jews, and downplayed the significance of Poles who actively helped kill Jews as outliers.
The Times of Israel Community.