A plan to place a monument in memory of Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto in Warsaw has sparked an angry outcry from survivor groups.
A collection of Shoah survivors' children sent a letter to the panel of judges due to select the designer of the monument, objecting to "the violation of the symbolic ground immortalising murder of the Jewish people".
The letter went on: "The proposed monument, if erected, will be standing on the blood-soaked ground containing the remains of the hundreds of thousands of Jews, who in this very place died from starvation and diseases, and from where they were taken on their final journey to the gas chambers of Treblinka."
Sixty-six-year-old Canadian Henry Lewkowicz, a child of a survivor, helped write the letter. He said: "The square, with its Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and Martyrs, symbolises the profound abandonment, complete isolation and cruel death of Jews imprisoned behind the Ghetto walls. Adding another monument on this site, even for the heroic Righteous Poles, is inappropriate, insensitive, and overpoweringly changes the narrative and the perception of the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto.
"We support the idea of honouring the heroic Polish Righteous and we hope that any commemoration will be done with the consent and support of the wider Jewish community."
Milada Slizinska, the chair of the judging panel, denied responsibility for the location of the memorial. "Our mission was only to choose the winning project," she said.
Dariusz Stola, director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, backed the decision to place the monument in the ghetto. "The arguments that this space should be 'left as a place of silence' are dubious. If consistently applied, these arguments would lead us to destroy the museum, or even the whole district."