The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS) has condemned as “shameful” and “unacceptable” an article by Greek journalist Elena Akrita published on Tuesday about this week’s incidents of police violence in Athens for drawing “nonexistent parallels” between the conditions at the Auschwitz camp during World War II “with life in a democratic country like Greece.”

“Auschwitz exterminated 1,500,000 people,” the statement read, adding that the “Greek Jews, those of us who passed through the Auschwitz gate and survived and are still alive, the descendants of the victims, will never stop denouncing any attempt to denigrate and instrumentalize the Holocaust, which leads to oblivion and the distortion of history.”