* Chinese PM calls camp “dark page in history”
* Visit intended to show recognition of war suffering
OSWIECIM, Poland, April 27 (Reuters) – China’s Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao said on Friday a visit to the Auschwitz
death camp where Nazis gassed to death 1.5 million people had
left an indelible impression, and reinforced the importance of
learning the lessons of history.
“This is an unforgettable, dark page in the history of
humankind and cannot be forgotten,” Wen said after touring the
former death camp in southern Poland that is now a museum
containing gas chambers and crematoria, as well as personal
items like shoes and even hair of those who perished there.
“Only those who remember history can build a good future,”
Wen said.
As many as 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished during
World War Two in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, a hallmark of the
Holocaust, either in gas chambers or from freezing temperatures,
starvation, sickness, medical experiments and forced labour.
Wen’s visit to Auschwitz appeared intended to show that he
understood the scale of war-time suffering across Nazi-occupied
Europe.
More than other Chinese leaders, Wen has cast himself as an
advocate of moderate political reform and what Chinese liberal
thinkers call “universal values”, even as his government has
presided over crackdowns on political dissent.
China’s detention of dissident artist Ai Weiwei last year,
and the continued imprisonment of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Liu Xiaobo, are among examples that have sparked outcry
from the international community critical of China’s human
rights record.
Chinese memories of World War Two are dominated by their own
history of often brutal occupation by Japan before and during
the war, which started in Europe with Nazi Germany’s invasion of
Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
Wen has been touring European trade partners earlier this
week as Beijing is seeking ways to diversify its foreign
currency reserves, the world’s biggest.
Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish community before
1939, but the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust all but wiped it out and
oppression continued under the later communist regime.
(Reporting by Zdzislaw Lanik, additional reporting by Kevin Yao
in Warsaw and Chris Buckley in Beijing, writing by Gabriela
Baczynska; Editing by Michael Roddy)
