International News

WARSAW, July 5 (APP/AFP): Poland’s chief rabbi
on Wednesday condemned a US congressman for recording a video inside a gas chamber at the former Nazi-German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, calling it inappropriate activity at a memorial site.
“This is a place to be quiet. This is a place to meditate, to think
— not a place to make videos and to make statements,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich said of the site located in the southern city of Oswiecim.
“And certainly the idea of using Auschwitz and the gas chamber to
express a political point of view is very disturbing to me,” he told AFP.
The five-minute video — for which Republican congressman Clay
Higgins has since apologised — shows him touring the site where 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, died, and commenting on the horrors of the camp that Nazi Germany set up after occupying Poland during World War II.
“This is why homeland security must be squared away. Why our military
must be invincible,” Higgins says while standing inside a gas chamber during the video released earlier this month.
“It’s hard to walk away from gas chambers and ovens without a very
sober feeling of commitment, unwavering commitment, to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”