Updated
Holocaust survivor groups have asked Poland to explain a video showing naked men and women running around in what is believed to be a Nazi gas chamber.
- The video was filmed in 1999 and exhibited in Poland in 2015
- About 65,000 people were killed at Stutthof concentration camp
- It was the last camp to be liberated
The video is named Game of Tag and was filmed in 1999 by Artur Zmijewski. It was exhibited in Krakow in 2015 despite Israeli objections. The filming location at that time was unknown.
But after the British royal visit early this year, experts compared the footage and concluded the Polish site, east of the city of Gdansk, was the same concentration camp where the footage was filmed.
A number of Jewish groups, including the Organisation of Holocaust Survivors in Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal centre, have now addressed a letter to Polish president Andrzej Duda to explain how the game had been filmed inside a Nazi camp gas chamber and whether the artist had been given permission.
Stutthof, where some 65,000 people were killed by lethal injection, gas chamber, shooting and hanging, as well as disease and malnutrition, was the first Nazi camp to be set up outside German borders in 1939 and the last camp to be liberated.
"It's really outrageous. I hope the Polish president will put in place regulations to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen again," the Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff told the BBC.
"It was banned in Germany, Estonia took in down when we contacted them. In Poland for some reason, which lost 6 million people — 3 million Jews and 3 million Poles — they didn't get it," he said.
A lawyer in Jerusalem, David Schonberg, realised the video was shot in Stutthof after seeing the same stains, a ledge along one side, a central plughole and the doors as was shown in footage of the royal visit to the camp, the BBC reported.
Reuters
Topics: world-war-2, unrest-conflict-and-war, history, film-movies, poland
First posted