Bedzin, Poland – The Polish city of Bedzin was planning a reenactment of the 1943 liquidation of its Jewish ghetto by the Nazis.
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The reenactment, involving 200 people including professional actors, residents and students, was in plan to take place today in the southern city.
“There will be no drastic scenes, no executions,” organiser Adam Szydlowski told AFP, adding that he would play a member of the SS and his seven-year-old son would play a Jewish boy.
“The goal is to teach the history of our city, which people know little about,” he said.
Last year, the local government organized a reenactment of the 1939 arrival of the Nazis, including the burning of the city’s main synagogue.
Around 30,000 Jews lived in the Bedzin ghetto and almost all of them died during the Nazi occupation, the majority at the Auschwitz concentration camp 50 kilometres (30 miles) away.
There is only one Jewish family living in the city today.
The liquidation of the ghetto and final transfers of Jews to Auschwitz took place in August 1943.
The reenactment is part of a series of events on Jewish culture organized by the Bedzin government and Israel’s embassy in Poland
But plans to use children for the re-enactment have been shelved following criticism from Jewish groups.
Jewish community groups condemned the involvement of young children in role-play depictions of the 1943 destruction saying they should have no place in the re-creation of the “mass murder” of thousands of people.
“Re-enacting battles or the march of armies is one thing but it is completely different re-enacting mass murder,” said Jaroslaw Szczepanksi, president of the Polish branch of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish international humanitarian society.
Jan Hartman, a philosophy professor and another B’nai B’rith member, added that he thought exposing children of junior-school age to the powerful emotions connected with ghetto’s liquidation was “extremely risky and morally ambiguous”.
But Adam Szydlowski, the organiser of the event, stressed that they were no “harrowing scenes” such as executions in the re-enactment, explaining that his goal was “to teach the history of our city”.
He added that he had the support of Israeli groups and that the re-enactment was just one of many cultural events celebrating the town’s Jewish past, and highlighting a little-known 1941 uprising of Jews in the Bedzin ghetto.
