Poland will allow a controversial shopping center to be built across the street from the site of the Auschwitz death camp.
The president of the company developing the project in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim was quoted as saying the center will be geared to serve hundreds of thousands of people who visit the museum and memorial at Auschwitz each year.
“We have bowed to government requests and reoriented the project to serve visitors to the museum,” Janusz Marszalek, president of the Maja company, told Reuters in Warsaw.
The plans, according to accounts made public in Warsaw, call for a restaurant, bank, post office and souvenir shop across the street from a large parking area that serves the Auschwitz museum.
The refreshment stands and souvenir kiosks currently on the grounds of the museum would be removed.
Marszalek originally planned to build a mini-shopping center geared to serve local Oswiecim residents. This project was halted in 1996 after Jews protested that it would desecrate the memory of the more than 1.5 million people killed there by the Nazis.
Ninety percent of Auschwitz victims were Jews, from across Europe.
The Polish government has established a protected zone around Auschwitz and has been drawing up a development plan for the surrounding area.
Citing the more than half-million visitors who pay homage to Holocaust victims at Auschwitz each year, Jewish leaders in Poland say the services offered in Marszalek’s new plan are necessary.
Nonetheless, the Auschwitz Museum and others have expressed reservations about the scheme.
“The restaurant, souvenir shop, etc. are needed there, and indeed they do exist now inside or just at the entrance to the museum,” said Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jewish leader. “The Maja project would improve the situation.”
At the same time, he stressed, “it is important not to build anything that is not part of the general development plan for the area.”
This plan “is not ready yet, so the directors of the Auschwitz Museum are against the Maja project, and I, too, would support this position.”
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