Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Tuesday he would not take part in the conference because the organisers had not allowed him to speak at the event.
The World Holocaust Forum is scheduled to take place on January 23 at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
Duda has previously said that he needed “to be able to speak alongside other presidents” in order to present the “historical truth, which, unfortunately, has been falsified recently.”
A statement on the Forum of Polish Jews website said: “So everything seems to indicate that the nations that will be represented in Jerusalem are the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement signatories (Germany and Russia), the principal Holocaust perpetrators (Germany), and those who gladly––even enthusiastically––sent Jews to German gas chambers in Auschwitz (France).
“But the Polish President, representing the state whose government yelled the alarm to the entire world about massive Jewish extermination in German-occupied Poland, is the only voice that will not be included or heard,” the English-language statement on the website added.
Anger in Warsaw
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently suggested that Poland was partly responsible for the outbreak of World War II, and claimed that the Soviet Union helped “save lives” after it invaded Poland in 1939 following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany.
The comments triggered anger in Warsaw. Duda on Tuesday accused Putin of “post-Stalinist revisionism” and of trying to shift the blame for the outbreak of World War II onto Poland.
Meanwhile, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Paweł Jabłoński said: “It is unacceptable, at a conference dedicated to the Holocaust, for Vladimir Putin to be one of key speakers and for Poland's president not to be able to speak.”
(pk)
Source: wiadomosci.wp.pl/forumzydowpolskichonline.org