Israeli president says Poland aided in murder of Jews during WWII

The presidents of Israel and Poland called for increased efforts to combat anti-Semitism as the world marked 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Holocaust Memorial Day is held every year on 27 January. The participants use the occasion to warn about the rise of anti-Semitism and hatred in the modern world.
“Our duty is to fight anti-Semitism, racism and fascist nostalgia, those sick evils that… threaten to eat away at the foundations of our democracies” Israel’s president Reuven Rivlin said at the event.
“This presence is a sign of remembrance, it is a visible sign of opposition to inhuman treatment, hatred, against all forms of hate, especially racist hate”, said Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, who did not attend Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial last week because he was not invited to speak.
The event, however, did not go without tensions between Poland and Israel. Rivlin called on Poland not to politicize the history of the Holocaust. He reminded that Poland celebrates the Poles who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust, but does not mention Poles who aided the Germans and killed Jews.
Studies show that anti-Semitic sentiment persists, especially in Europe. French president Emmanuel Macron also warned about rising hate crimes in France, which increased 27% last year: “That anti-Semitism is coming back is not the Jewish people’s problem: It’s all our problem – it’s the nation’s problem”, he said.
Some six million Jews and millions of other ethnic minorities were brutally slaughtered during World War II. Hitler’s genocide wiped out two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Around 1.5 million of them were children. Most of the 1.1 million people murdered at the camp by the Nazis were Jewish.
Some 6 million Polish citizens, including 3 million Polish Jews, were killed in the war.