Tourists charged with stealing bricks from Auschwitz memorial

Two Hungarian tourists have admitted to trying to steal bricks from the ruins of a crematorium at the site of the former Nazi German death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to police.

The 30-year-old woman and 36-year-old man were caught on Saturday when another pair of foreign tourists saw them stuffing the bricks into a bag and notified security.

“The man and woman were charged with theft of a cultural asset. They both admitted to wrongdoing,” said regional police press officer Mateusz Drwal.

“They explained that they had wanted to bring back a souvenir and didn’t realize the consequences of their actions,” he told the Polish news agency PAP.

The Hungarian tourists were each fined 1,500 zloty ($400) and handed a suspended sentence of one year in jail.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of European Jews, one million of whom were killed at the camp between 1940 to 1945.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there.

Several other people have been charged with stealing artifacts from the site, including five people arrested in 2009 for stealing the infamous bronze sign over the entrance, which reads “Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free).”

Among the others accused of taking items from the site were two British students caught with shards of glass, buttons, a hair clipper and bits of metal, two Belgians accused of stealing parts of an electric fence and an Israeli granddaughter of Holocaust a survivors, who admitted to stealing historical objects from the site for an art project.