Anti-Semitic vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery near the site of “Bloody Wednesday” where Jewish men were gathered in the town square of Olkusz, Poland and beaten in 1940.

The vandals painted pentagrams on the tombstones they knocked over and destroyed.   They also painted the Polish name of Pope John Paul II on some stones.

“Bloody Wednesday” took place in Olkusz on July 31, 1940.  Soldiers went through the town gathering the Jewish men to bring to the town’s square.  The men were then severely beaten by the soldiers and residents of the town.

One of the most offensive moments was captured in photographs of the incident when Rabbi Moshe Yitzchak Hagerman is forced to stand barefoot standing over six Jewish men who were forced to lay on the ground in front of Nazi troops.  Hagerman was forced to wear a prayer shawl that the soldiers had urinated upon moments earlier.

Hagerman was killed in Majdanek in 1942.  The rest of the town’s Jews were shipped to Auschwitz in 1942 where most were killed.