Polish president says ‘no room’ for anti-Semitism in his country

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s president strongly condemns all forms of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism as he leads commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of a massacre of Jews after World War II.

Duda speaks in Kielce, where communist police and a mob killed dozens of people on July 4, 1946. Coming a year after the end of World War II, the killings sent waves of fear through Poland’s Jewish community and sparked a wave of Jewish emigration from Poland.

“In a free, sovereign and independent Poland there is no room for any form of prejudice, for racism, for xenophobia, for anti-Semitism,” Duda says in a speech in Kielce, according to remarks carried by the Polish news agency PAP.

The massacre in Kielce occurred when townspeople and communist-era police attacked the Jews of Kielce with guns and clubs. The mob killed 42 people, mostly Jews, while about 30 more were killed in a violent frenzy that spread across the area. The massacre was a huge blow to the estimated 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors — those left from a prewar Jewish population of nearly 3.5 million — leading many to feel unsafe in their homeland.

— AP