“The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days,’’ Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said in a statement from Jerusalem.
“I call on all enlightened forces in the world who fight against anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the other, to join together to combat these trends.’’
The sign disappeared from the Auschwitz memorial between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., Padlo said.
Police deployed 50 police, including 20 detectives, and a search dog to the Auschwitz grounds, where barracks, watchtowers, and ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Police said they were reviewing footage from a surveillance camera that overlooks the entrance gate and the road beyond, but declined to say whether the crime was recorded.
Auschwitz museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt said it might have been too dark for the camera to have captured images.
He said the thieves apparently carried the sign 300 yards to an opening in a concrete wall. That opening had been left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating to the time of the war.
Four metal bars that had blocked the opening were cut. Footprints in the snow led from the wall opening to the nearby road, where police presume the sign was loaded on to a vehicle.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he had trouble imagining who would steal the sign.
“If they are pranksters, they’d have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory,’’ Schudrich said.
Police were offering a $1,700 reward for public tipoffs about the thieves.
