Israeli woman removed Auschwitz relics to use for art project
Rotem Bides, 27, took items including a sign warning visitors not to remove anything from the former Nazi camp
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum located on the site of the former Nazi camp said it will file a complaint with the Polish prosecutor against an Israeli woman who removed relics from site.
Rotem Bides, 27, an art student at the Beit Berl College, visited the Auschwitz site six times and removed relics including shards of glass, small bowls, a metal screw, soil and a sign warning visitors not to take anything from the former Nazi camp, Ynet reported. She also told Ynet she removed a teaspoon from the site but lost it.
Bides, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, including a grandfather she says survived Auschwitz, used the samples as part of her final project for the Beit Berl College’s Faculty of Art. She collected them while an exchange student in Krakow, she told Ynet.
Since the theft of the objects became public, Beit Berl College removed Bides’ exhibition and has summoned her for a disciplinary hearing.
Bides told Ynet that she is aware that she broke the law, but that she chose to act that way in a place where all basic rules had been violated. She said she also committed the theft as a way to answer to herself the question of what will remain of the survivors’ memories when they are no longer alive.
“I felt it was something I had to do,” she told Ynet’s parent publication Yediot Acharonot. “Millions of people were murdered based on the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if these are the laws, I can go there and act according to my own laws. The statement I’m making here is that laws are determined by humans, and that morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.”
Museum spokesman, Bartosz Bartyzel, told Yediot Acharonot that the museum expected Israel’s state attorney to intercede and return the relics. “We plan to report the matter both to the Polish Public Prosecutor General and to the Israeli ambassador in Poland,” he also said.
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