Poland closes controversial discotheque near Auschwitz

The disco, located in a building where camp prisoners were forced into slave labour by the Nazis during World War II, drew the ire of international Holocaust remembrance groups. Among those who protested was the Simon Weisenthal Centre, which said the club encouraged young people "to dance in the immediate vicinity of the largest Jewish graveyard in history." The decision to revoke the operating permit for the discotheque was issued earlier this week by Malopolska Provincial Governor Ryszard Maslowski. The licence was withdrawn after a review of zoning laws and complaints filed by the neighbouring International Youth Meeting Centre, run by a German organisation focussed on Holocaust education. According to the governor's spokesperson, Artur Paszko, the nightclub owner, Piotr Bieniek, has 30 days to appeal the decision to shut down his operation with Poland's Supreme Administative Court. It is unclear whether such an appeal will be launched. Two alternative sites for the relocation of the disco in Oswiecim have been offered by its mayor, Jozef Krawczyk, Poland's leading daily Rzeczpospolita reported Tuesday. An international storm of protest erupted in mid-2000 after municipal authorities in Oswiecim granted the owners of the disco a permit to operate at the former Nazi slave labour site, a stone's throw from the Auschwitz camp museum, which is designated as an UNESCO world heritage site. Despite those protests, Polish authorities, including top government officials, said they were powerless to close the club, as it was a business like any other operating within the law. Between 1942 and 1945, the building where the disco is located was used by the Nazis as a tannery, run with 1,000 slave labourers from Auschwitz, who were forced to march the two kilometres from the main camp each day under an SS escort. Hundreds are know to have died there from exhaustion and abuse. Unclear regulations on a protective zone around Auschwitz have caused similar controversy near the site of Nazi genocide, with increasing numbers of businesses operating near the former death camp over the decade since the collapse of communism in Poland. The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Adolf Hitler's most notorious death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, claimed more than 1.3 million lives and remains the most poignant reminder of Nazi Germany's "final solution" plan of ethnic genocide against European Jews.

(dpa)