An art installation showing naked men and women playing a game of tag in one of the gas chambers in a former Nazi concentration camp has caused outrage among Holocaust survivors’ groups.
The video was filmed in the Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdansk, Poland, and displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow in 2015.
It shows a handful of naked men and women chasing each other around a former gas chamber at the camp where some 65,000 people were murdered by Nazis during World War II.
Shocking: The video was filmed in one of the old gas chambers of the former Stutthof Nazi concentration camp near Gdansk in Poland
Several organisations representing Holocaust survivors are now demanding that Polish President Andrzej Duda explain why it was allowed to take place and be filmed.
The video was shown as an art installation for an exhibition called ‘Poland – Israel – Germany. The experience of Auschwitz,’ and was later removed after protests.
At the time, the Museum did not divulge the exact location where it was filmed.
The Organization of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and several other groups contacted President Duda this week after it emerged that the video was filmed in the ruins of Stutthof camp, Times of Israel reports.
It comes just weeks after two former Stuffhof guards were charged with being accessories to murder while they worked at the World War II concentration camp.
Horrifying: Holocaust survivors’ groups are demanding that the President of Poland explain how the ‘naked game of tag’ was allowed to take place and why it was allowed to be filmed
Death camp: Some 65,000 people were murdered or died from malnutrition and cold in Stutthof concentration camp in Poland during World War II
The indictments were filed against a 93-year-old man from Borken who served in Stutthof from June 1942 to September 1944 and a 92-year-old man from Wuppertal who was there from June 1944 to May 1945.
Both deny they had any knowledge of killings at the camp, Brendel said.
About 65,000 people died at Stutthof. Some were put to death in gas chambers or shot, while others died from malnutrition or froze to death.
Members of the SS killed more than 100 Polish prisoners and some 77 Soviet prisoners of war in the camp’s gas chamber in 1944. An unknown number of Jews also were gassed there in late 1944.
Between June 1944 and April 1945, SS members also killed several hundred Jews by shooting them in the back of the neck.
SS-physicians and nurses at Stutthof killed more than 140 prisoners, many of them Jewish women and children, by injecting their hearts with gasoline and the chemical compound phenol from late 1942 until late 1944.
The Soviet Army’s liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, the same day World War II ended.