A foundation based steps from the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site has filed criminal and ethics complaints against a far-right Polish lawmaker who displayed an Israeli flag defaced with a Nazi swastika on the floor of parliament on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation submitted the criminal complaint to the Warsaw prosecutor’s office against Konrad Berkowicz, a member of the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament. The filing alleges violations of Polish statutes prohibiting the promotion of totalitarian ideologies and the incitement of hatred based on nationality, ethnicity or religion. A parallel ethics complaint was submitted to the Sejm seeking disciplinary action against Berkowicz.

The incident unfolded Tuesday when Berkowicz took the parliamentary rostrum, unfurled the defaced flag and declared Israel the “new Third Reich.” The act drew immediate condemnation from lawmakers across the political spectrum.

Tuesday was Yom HaShoah, the annual day of Holocaust remembrance, as survivors, officials and thousands of students from around the world gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau — fewer than two miles from the foundation’s offices — to commemorate the more than one million Jews and others murdered there.

“What we witnessed was not criticism of a state, but the inversion of the Holocaust itself,” said Jack Simony, director general of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. “To take the symbol of the Jewish state and deface it with a Nazi emblem on Yom HaShoah is not political expression. It is the deliberate abuse of history to incite hatred. We work in Oświęcim, where the consequences of that hatred are not theoretical. They are counted in the more than one million people who were murdered.”

Foundation Chairman Simon Bergson said the complaint carried legal, not merely symbolic, weight. “Polish law prohibits what occurred in that chamber, and we expect it to be enforced,” Bergson said. “Democratic institutions either hold the line or they do not.”

Poland maintains strict legal prohibitions on Nazi symbolism. Legal experts noted that the parliamentary setting — an official proceeding of the state — could weigh significantly in any prosecutorial assessment. Sejm Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty condemned the incident as a violation of parliamentary dignity and signaled that financial penalties and other disciplinary measures may follow.

Tomasz Kuncewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, said the episode struck at the core of the institution’s mission.

“When history is inverted and its symbols are weaponized to incite new hatred, it is not only an offense against the dead,” Kuncewicz said. “It is a direct assault on everything this institution stands for.”

The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, which supports the last remaining synagogue in Oświęcim and has hosted more than one million visitors at its educational center, said it expects prosecutors to treat the complaint seriously given both the legal framework and the gravity of the setting in which the act occurred.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)