Laughter through Tears

    SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, June 29, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- It is said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. In 2015, the Auschwitz extermination camp, known worldwide, endured repetition of the past tragedy as a farce. Recently, British teenagers stole some personal belongings of the prisoners from the museum, and few months before that, a film crew from the Jewish community in Rome was left locked in the camp at night, and neither the director of the museum nor the head of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder helped them.

Polish police say two British teenagers have been detained and questioned on suspicion they stole objects that belonged to the victims of the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp. If convicted of stealing objects of special historic value, they could face up to 10 years in prison.

It's not the first embarrassment happened in Auschwitz this year. In January the head of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, was left behind after a ceremony commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day. Pacifici, whose grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, was part of filming a program on the liberation of the camp broadcast. Pacifici said that event organizer and museum director had given him permission to stay behind after the museum closed and that the guards were supposed to let his group out at 23:30. When filming was over, Pacifici and his team discovered they were locked in the camp. The temperature was ten degrees below zero as they stood under the famous Arbeit macht frei sign, jumping up and down in front of the security cameras and calling out in hopes of drawing attention. Pacifici writes that he was unable to reach the museum director by phone. Nor could he get a call through to WJC president Ron Lauder, the main organizer of the memorial events. Without waiting longer for help, the Italian Jews and journalists tried to get out of the camp by crawling through a window in the ticket office. An alarm went off and the guards finally showed up, accompanied by police. Pacifici wrote on his microblog that the police were extremely harsh with him and the other members of the group and called the whole incident "a disgrace." The head of Rome's Jewish community also criticized Poland and the event organizers from the World Jewish Congress who, in his words, "were not at their best" and failed to react to what happened. This type of incident doesn't seem to fit in with the concept of glamorous fight against anti-Semitism by the WJC's VIP leaders in the presence of heads of state, accepting donations, handing out prizes and receiving awards.

Additional Information:
Ronald S. Lauder - President of the World Jewish Congress, international philanthropist, investor, art collector, media mogul, former public servant and heir of Estee Lauder cosmetic giant. Different media sources claim that many of Ronald Lauder's efforts and institutions are perched on the line between good and evil. Lately he has been directly involved in the big media scandal in Romania, connected to CME company, founded by Ronald Lauder. Romanian authorities have a suspicion that CME is a double-purpose media empire.

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