Russia hopes improving relations with Poland will allow it to reopen soon its permanent national exhibition in the Auschwitz concentration camp museum.
On Wednesday, 65 years to the day after the Nazi's largest death camp, located near Krakow in southern Poland, was liberated by Soviet troops, Russia opened a temporary exhibition at the Auschwitz museum. January 27 is marked around the world as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"The current display is temporary, but it will be a part of a permanent Russian exhibition to be displayed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in the future," said Viktor Skryabin, the head of Russia's Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which prepared the exhibition.
Auschwitz has a number of permanent national exhibitions in which states can display dossiers and personal belongings of their nationals who died in the camp. At least a million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at the camp between 1940 and 1945.
Russia's permanent exhibition, opened in 1961, was closed in early 2007, reportedly following disagreements over the nationality of prisoners from territories in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus - which were part of Poland before World War II. Russia insists that prisoners from these areas should be considered citizens of the Soviet Union.
According to Russian media reports, the museum administration said it would only reopen the exhibition if Russia recognized the Soviet occupation of Polish territories.
The 1939 German-Soviet pact on non-aggression, in which the two countries pledged neutrality and secretly agreed to divide Northern and Eastern Europe, including Poland, into spheres of influence, remains a contentious issue in Russia-Poland relations.
Auschwitz took its name from the nearby town of Oswiecim, situated about 50 kilometers west of Krakow and 286 kilometers from Warsaw. Following the Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939, Oswiecim was incorporated into Germany and renamed Auschwitz.
AUSCHWITZ, Poland, January 27 (RIA Novosti)
