(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.
The Nazis murdered three million non-Jews in Poland, in addition to three million Jewish Poles — half of all the Jews they had murdered throughout Europe.
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.
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