News stories from Poland have confirmed that the Polish state railway intends to proceed with a decision to sell off at auction, on 22 June, the ex-Command Post at the Nazi extermination camp at Belzec (seen above in a picture taken in 1942), where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were murdered, mostly Jews.

Clearly, the various appeals made to Poland by a range of international organisations to preserve the building and entrust it to the nearby camp Memorial have had no effect.

The Italian ex-prisoners of Nazi camps within the ranks of ANED therefore appeal to the European Union, and in particular to Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to step in to ensure that this site of historical interest is not broken up into pieces. The European Commission must immediately intervene with the Polish Government to block the proposed sale, and if necessary to purchase, in the name of all the peoples of Europe, a building that represents the suffering caused by the criminal extermination policy of the Nazis.

If the European Commission does not accept this appeal, ANED – which did not hesitate fifty years ago, along with the Amicale (an organisation of French camp survivors), to buy the land on which the Gusen sub-camp crematorium oven was located, and which now receives tens of thousands of visitors every year to its Memorial – declares its intention to participate in the auction on 22 June, to make a valid bid for the building, and to create a fund-raising appeal to that end.

This episode underlines the urgency of the need to bring what is left of the Nazi concentration camps under UNESCO control, as discussed in the recent ANED Assembly held on 3 May in Milan, in order to ensure that they are preserved for future generations.

National Association of italian ex-deportees into the nazi camps