Holocaust memorial regrets mistakes

JERUSALEM — Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, issued an apology Monday for videos presented during a ceremony attended by world leaders last month, saying they included “a number of inaccuracies.”

Dan Michman, head of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, said in a statement that several short films aired at the World Holocaust Forum that were meant to give a summary of World War II “included a number of inaccuracies that resulted in a partial and unbalanced presentation of the historical facts.”

Yad Vashem said the videos at the Jan. 23 event in Jerusalem neglected to mention Poland’s division between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 or Nazi Germany’s conquest of Western Europe in 1940. The videos also showed incorrect borders of Poland and labeled concentration camps as extermination camps.

January’s memorial event, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, was beset by conflict over competing national narratives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended the memorial, has tried to shift responsibility for World War II’s outbreak to Poland, which was invaded by Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union in 1939 as part of a prewar pact to divide the country.

The president of Poland, which has tried to downplay its own complicity in the Holocaust, did not attend the event in Jerusalem in protest of Putin’s central role in the event and his own exclusion from the podium.