Calling out Nazism in this war is a “heinous insult,” says the director of the Auschwitz Museum.

The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum believes that referring to Nazism in Ukraine as justification for the Russian invasion is a “disgusting curse” in a war that Kiev must win without any concessions to Moscow.

In a written interview with Lusa, Piotr Cywinski contextualizes the argument about the Nazi threat in Ukraine as propaganda from Moscow and emphasizes that he would like to avoid entering into this discussion, given that he refers to “fundamental notions of European history and the world as ‘Nazis'”, and in this In a sense, he only stated that “it’s a disgusting insult.”

However, Piotr Tsyvinsky said he was curious to know “whether the use of this term in relation to innocent Ukraine [cujo Presidente, Volodymyr Zelensky, é judeu] was supposed, according to the Kremlin “apparatchiks”, to strengthen Russian opinion and was intended for internal use, “or in democratic societies outside of Russia,” they would believe this primitive lie.

The director of the memorial and museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a former Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp in Poland during World War II, argued that “Ukraine must win lest we all lose,” describing the Russian invasion, which began on February 24 last year, as “an era of war declared by Russia”, but ignores the course of history, following the “madness of this aggression, its absurdity and cruelty”, which demonstrate that in theory all scenarios should be taken into account.

With a doctorate in the humanities and medieval history, director of the Memorial since 2006 and an extensive body of work on Auschwitz-Birkenau, Warsaw-born Piotr Cywinski 50 years ago warned, however, that he would be more concerned with the world. and its order in the future, “if there were any symptoms, even slight signs from the West, that someone is afraid” of Russia.

“In the face of international terror, even the smallest concessions made out of fear or calculation cannot be accepted. Even if there is a price to be paid for courage and truth. Otherwise, this price will be paid directly later, although it is immeasurably higher, he argued, emphasizing: “This is the main experience of the last 250 years of each of the peoples living in the vicinity of Russia.”

It was one of the reasons why Russia, whose troops occupied the concentration camp in 1945, was first excluded last month from an event marking the anniversary of its liberation.

For those responsible for the Memorial, the criteria for excluding Russia are very simple. First, Polish institutions “refrain from any contact with the Russian Federation other than necessary” following Russia’s “unprovoked and unjustified aggression against an independent and democratic Ukraine.”

Then, the war in Ukraine “makes it difficult to imagine that representatives of a bloody state that rapes and plunders Ukrainian civilians can perform in a place that for the entire adult world represents the greatest genocidal wound inflicted on various groups of civilians in history. from Europe”.

Peter Tsyvinsky does not give advice to the warring parties, insisting only that Kiev must emerge victorious, but he left a message to the Russian people: “Every week of the war, in every destroyed and slaughtered village, you move away from many years ago from this world to which you so eager. You have to understand that the Kremlin’s megalomania is killing Ukrainians, but it is also killing you and probably many other generations.”

Moscow’s forces were in an alliance that liberated Europe from Nazi rule, but when it comes to respect for the victims of World War II, it “ended in Russia on February 24, 2022.”

In the West, “this respect is expressed in the help given to Ukraine so that it can defend itself courageously,” Zywinski said, concluding: “As for the rest, the International Court of Justice in The Hague has a lot of work to do. “.