Warsaw (AFP) - Hundreds of people marched through Warsaw on Friday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Nazi liquidation of its Jewish ghetto, with the war in Ukraine giving the event fresh resonance.
The procession passed through the location where Jews were deported from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp in central Poland in 1942, an operation that left 260,000 people dead.
Marchers carried symbolic ribbons bearing the names of the deportees.
This year's march was dedicated to the theme of victims of deportations and forced displacement, with millions of Ukrainians having fled their homes due to Russia's invasion on February 24.
Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told the ceremony that the ghetto represented a "division" between its inmates, presented as evil, and the "good people" who lived outside it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin "has tried once again to divide people.Every time I hear people speak about a division between good and bad, it's a red flag for me," he said.
Nazi Germany created the Warsaw ghetto -- the biggest of its kind in World War II -- in 1940 to hold almost half a million Jews during its occupation of Poland.
Residents were crammed into a small neighbourhood where disease and hunger were rife, before a decree announcing the start of the ghetto's liquidation arrived on July 22, 1942.
In three months, 260,000 people -- a quarter of Warsaw's population -- were deported to Treblinka and killed as part of the Holocaust.
