World news-roundup: Bucharest gives survivors compensation

World Roundup 250517

Country: Romania

Lawmakers in Bucharest have voted to give more money to Romania’s Holocaust survivors, allocating an additional £80 per month for each year of deportation or detention. The law also applies to all Romanian survivors who no longer live in the country, including those who no longer have citizenship.

Country: Bulgaria

Bulgarian Jews condemned as ‘inappropriate’ comments made last week by the country’s deputy prime minister, who he said he may have ‘horsed around’ at a Nazi death camp in his youth. Valeri Simeonov said he and friends took prank photos of themselves while visiting Buchenwald during the 1970s.

Country: Poland

A city leader wants an anti-Semitic pogrom to be purged from the pages of a graphic novel about the Jewish inventor of universal language Esperanto, saying it showed Bialystok ‘in a bad light’. Alderman Marek Chojnowski wants to censor the pages showing residents beating Jews with clubs in 1906.

Country: Netherlands

One of Anne Frank’s childhood friends has sold a handwritten poem by the teenage diarist and donated a third of the money to the building of a Holocaust memorial for Dutch Jews.Jacqueline van Maarsen, who is not Jewish, wants a commemorative wall featuring the names 102,000 Dutch Jews killed.