Swastika, SS symbol painted on wall of Jewish cemetery near Auschwitz

Graffiti removed shortly after it is discovered; Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum says incident is ‘painful’

By Cnaan Liphshiz 12 January 2021, 7:43 am

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Cnaan Liphshiz was a Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel

A swastika on the wall of a Jewish cemetery in Oświęcim, Poland, Jan. 10, 2021. (The Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau via JTA)

JTA — An unidentified individual scrawled a swastika and the Nazi SS symbol on a wall of a Jewish cemetery in the city of Oświęcim, Poland, near the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum posted a picture of the graffiti on its Twitter account Sunday, noting it was near the former death camp that the Nazis built there in 1940, and where they murdered more than a million Jews.

The incident is “painful” and a reminder that “we need to keep fighting against all forms of hatred,” the museum wrote. The images were removed shortly after they were discovered.

Poland has seen a resurgence in right-wing nationalist sentiment in recent years. However, the glorification of Nazi ideology and symbols, which is common throughout much of Eastern Europe and beyond, is relatively rare in Poland.