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Jewish Victims Ignored at Stutthoff Camp Memorial, As Israel is Denounced

May 17, 1968
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An official of the Polish Communist Party used a concentration camp memorial unveiling Tuesday as the occasion for a scathing attack on Israel and Zionism. According to reports reaching here from Warsaw today, Zenon Klyszko, member of the central committee of the Polish Communist Party and deputy speaker of the Sejm (Parliament), made no mention of Jews when he enumerated the nationalities of persons who perished at the Stutthoff concentration camp. The camp, the first to be established by the Nazis on Polish soil, was liberated 23 years ago this month.

The anniversary of the Stutthoff liberation drew some 50,000 persons to the site where a memorial monument was dedicated. Among the high Government officials present were Minister of Interior Bieczlaw Moczar, one of the principal factors in the campaign of incitement against Poland’s surviving Jews, and Janusz Wieczorek, head of the authority for the preservation of memorials. Although the theme of the memorial was the martyrdom of the Stutthoff victims, among them tens of thousands of Jews, Klyszko devoted a large part of his speech to a condemnation of Israeli “reactionaries and militarists” whom he accused of having “a forgiving attitude toward the Hitlerite murders” while “international Zionist centers persist in fanning the anti-Polish campaign.”The newspaper, “Folkstimme,” Warsaw’s only Yiddish daily, published Klyszko’s speech in full without comment.

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