President marks 80th anniversary of first mass deportations of Jews

Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland, in a letter on Wednesday commemorated the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Jews during Aktion Reinhardt.

Aktion Reinhardt was the code name of the secretive German plan in World War Two to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland.

Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the first mass deportation of Jews, during Aktion Reinhardt, from the Lublin ghetto to Bełżec, a German Nazi complex of concentration camps and an extermination camp in and near the village of Bełżec along the Lublin-Lviv railway.

In a letter posted on the president's official website, Andrzej Duda wrote: "It is 80 years since the first cars filled with Jews, citizens of Poland, inhabitants of the south–eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic, were rolled onto the railway ramp here in Belzec. For over a year and a half, the German Nazi death factory claimed nearly half a million lives. They were exterminated only because they were Jews. They were murdered en masse in gas chambers, without care for an individual human being or even for accurate accounting. The Nazi occupiers acted methodically, industrially, possessed by a single idea: the annihilation of an entire nation and the robbery of every last bit of their wealth."

"Generations pass, but memory endures. The Museum–Memorial Site in Bełżec presents evidence of the crime, items that once belonged to the victims, and above all the names, surnames and photographs of those murdered by the Germans. The perpetrators wanted to erase all memories of the victims, but they did not succeed. The survivors, their rescuers and the witnesses of the Holocaust preserved the evidence and carried the terrible news of the extermination of the Jews into the world. Truth triumphed over lies, underneath which the Nazi genocide was attempted to be hidden. Today it is hard to believe that the murderers counted on impunity and distortion of their deeds," he added.

"The memory of the Holocaust endures and is a warning to each successive generation. It warns us of what totalitarian power, based on imperial ideology and racist contempt for other nations, leads to. We honour the victims of the Holocaust and make every effort that those who were bestially killed are laid to rest in dignified and respectful places. We are particularly aware of the importance of this today, when so close – only 550 km from here – an imperial aggression has been unleashed again with bombs raining down on the site of the massacre of Jews at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, with bombs dropped by the people who respect neither the freedom of the living nor the dignity of the dead," noted the president.

"The ongoing war reminds us that the memory of the victims of Aktion Reinhardt is a warning to us today. We must effectively prevent imperial designs, condemn incitement to hatred, and react resolutely to all manifestations of hostility and aggression. I believe that the free world will not lack the strength and consistency to do so. We are obliged to do so in memory of our Jewish fellow citizens and neighbours who were killed. May their memory live on!" concluded the Polish head of state.