Poland and Russia row over Auschwitz exhibition

Museum disputes Russian historians’ claim that almost half of the 6 million Jews who died during Holocaust were citizens of Soviet Union

A row has broken out between Poland and Russia over a memorial at the Auschwitz death camp to Russian victims of World War Two and the Nazi Holocaust, rekindling old resentments between the two countries. An exhibition at the camp museum dedicated to Russians who died in the war with Nazi Germany has been closed for three years and its opening has been delayed by a disagreement over the nationalities of the victims, officials said. Museum disputes Russian historians’ claim that almost half of the 6 million Jews who died during Holocaust were citizens of Soviet Union Russian historians say almost half the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust were citizens of the Soviet Union. But the Auschwitz museum disputes this, saying almost 1 million of these Jews were citizens of Poland, Romania and the Baltics, who were only in the Soviet Union as a result of a deal in 1939 between Hitler and Stalin to annex central Europe. They say these Jews are commemorated elsewhere in the museum, which covers two former German-run concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, near the southwestern Polish city of Oswiecim.(REUTERS/04.04.2007)