THE ISRAELI embassy yesterday slammed a photographic exhibition organised by the Green Party comparing the Burgenstock hotel where Cyrpus problem talks were held last year with the Dachau concentration camp where tens of thousands of Jews were killed in the Second Wordl War.
The exhibition of photographs from the Burgenstock Cyprus problem talks in Switzerland last year is entitled “The Dachau of Politicians”. Invitations to the opening show a photo of the hotel where the talks were held surrounded by a roll of barbed wire. The exhibition, which will take place between March 22 and 27 in Nicosia, is being organised by George Perdikis, the leader of the Green Party in Cyprus.
A spokeswoman at the Israeli embassy in Nicosia yesterday described the comparison with Dachau as being “in bad taste and a little insensitive”.
But Perdikis hit back at the criticism, saying the postcard meant no offence, calling it “a symbolic representation of the authorities in Burgenstock, who tried to manipulate politicians. I wasn’t allowed to leave the hotel complex without permission and no journalists were allowed in. I was pushed and locked inside the hotel by United Nations staff, in an effort to stop me talking to the press.”
He added that the invitation and title of the exhibition “has nothing to do with Jewish people, whom I respect. I am also totally against what Hitler did. I cannot see the connection between the postcard and genocide”.
The Israeli embassy spokeswoman said she was “particularly disappointed as we are bringing a Greek holocaust survivor from Auschwitz to Cyprus to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of all concentration camps on May 5.”
Established in March 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was the first regular concentration camp set up by the Nazis. Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as police president of Munich, officially described the camp as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners”.
It was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the north-eastern part of the town of Dachau, about 10 miles north-west of Munich, in southern Germany.
The number of prisoners incarcerated in Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 188,000. The number of prisoners who died in the camp and the sub-camps between January 1940 and May 1945 was at least 28,000, to which must be added those who perished there between 1933 and the end of 1939. It is unlikely that the total number of victims who died in Dachau will ever be known.
