MERCURY
DAVID KILLICK
MONA founder David Walsh has apologised for comments he made about about visitors to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In comments on his blog posted on Wednesday, Mr Walsh referred to the people who visit the former concentration camp each year as “creepy f…s”.
The camp has since become a memorial to the victims and a World Heritage site visited by more than one million people a year.
“I didn’t build Mona to serve the sort of creepy f…s that go to Auschwitz,” Mr Walsh wrote.
His comments drew condemnation from Australian Jewish community organisation the Anti-Defamation Commission, who called for him to apologise.
“Holocaust abuse and trivialisation has reared its ugly head again, and the timing could not be worse,” Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich said.
“This ugly and hurtful remark is a grievous slap in the face to the memory of the more than 1.5 million people who were tortured and murdered in Auschwitz, to those who endured the atrocities, and to those who liberated the camp,” Dr Abramovich said.
“For Mr Walsh to use such outrageously degrading and demeaning rhetoric about those who bravely enter the gates of hell in order to confront the truth and to express their grief, is a reminder that we have much work to do in Holocaust education and remembrance”
The comments were made on the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which 13,000 Jews died and ahead of Monday’s Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In response to a comment left on his website, Mr Walsh apologised.
“My intent was irony, and it was unfortunate. Not only was it offensive, for which I apologise, but it was sloppy, since it bore no relation to the subject that I was attempting to comment on,” he wrote.
“In an earlier version the text read, ‘it’d be like a cross between Madame Tussaud’s and a Jack the Ripper tour, but with more pathos and a good bar’.
“In attempting the same ironic outcome while trying to add punch, I changed my text to a reference to Auschwitz, without contemplating the more immediate ramifications for the very many with a potent connection to that tragic place.
“The punch I added was to my own glass jaw.”
Dr Abramovich invited Mr Walsh to visit the Jewish Holocaust Museum to better understand the Holocaust.