MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. Israel is not planning to speculate on the tragic events of World War II and the Holocaust and believes that any attempts to rewrite history are unacceptable, the country’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday.
“For Israel, the remembrance day for the Holocaust victims is a holy date,” Lieberman said as the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.
Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during World War II. Most of those imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was liberated 70 years ago, were Jews, out of which up to 2 million were killed there.
“Auschwitz was liberated by Marshal [Ivan] Konev and the Red Army. My father went through the war in the ranks of the Red Army, he served between July 5, 1941 and the spring of 1946 and was wounded. His brother died near Stalingrad [now Volgograd],” he said.
Lieberman stressed that any attempts to rewrite history “are absolutely unacceptable” while noting that other dangerous tendencies have been emerging in Europe.
“We have faced a completely new plague in the modern Europe, when Jews are killed for just being Jews,” the minister said, mentioning the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris in early January, as well as the murder of four Jews in Brussels, Belgium, and other related crimes in Toulouse, France.
“For us this is a very serious alarm signal about what is going on in the modern world,” he stressed, calling for unity against the new challenges, namely terrorism and extremism.
“It seems to me that this is in the interests of all the countries, states and people with normal human values,” Lieberman added.
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Last week, Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna claimed that Auschwitz “was liberated by the First Ukrainian Front and Ukrainians.” In his words, these were “Ukrainian soldiers” who opened the gates of the death camp.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the Polish foreign minister’s comments “blasphemous and cynical” and reminded that the Auschwitz camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, which included Russians, Ukrainians, Chechens, Georgians and Tatars.
According to different estimates, from 1.5 million to 2 million people of different nationalities, including around 15,000 Soviet citizens, were assassinated in the death camp. More than 200 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed in the battles for liberation of the camp and a neighbouring Polish town.