The last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising said Tuesday he would seek the help of the Polish government to silence Roman Catholic fundamentalist Radio Maryja’s anti-Semitic outbursts.

"In the next week, I will ask the government to intervene to halt this
business, which has already gone on for a while. Free Poland was born to be free, not to be chauvinistic," 83-year-old Marek Edelman said.

Late last month, Radio Maryja commentator Stanislaw Michalkiewicz said that "Jews have humiliated Poland internationally by demanding money" for goods and property expropriated during WWII.

"We look after democratic issues in Ukraine and Belarus, while in our own backyard, ’kikes’ sneak up behind us to try to oblige our government to pay them money on the pretext of these demands," he said.

Nearly all of Poland’s pre-war Jewish community of some 3.5 million -- the biggest in Europe -- was wiped out in the war, either in summary executions, by starvation or disease after being rounded up into ghettos, or in the Nazi German death camps set up in occupied Poland.

Those who escaped death in Poland or fled before the German occupation in 1939 left the country when it came under the domination of the Soviet Union, led in the immediate post-war years by avowed anti-Semite, Joseph Stalin.

Following Michalkiewicz’s openly anti-Semitic statements, Radio Maryja was warned by the state council for media ethics that "a radio station that calls itself Catholic should avoid" making such statements.

Polish complaint

The Otwarta Rzeczpospolita (Open Republic) organisation, which fights against acts of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, has lodged a complaint against the station with the Polish Higher Audiovisual Council, and is looking into the possibility of taking it to court.

"Because this was not a listener stating his opinion but a statement that came from the editorial staff which was broadcast more than once, and was posted on the station’s website, there are grounds to go to court," said the organisation’s president, Paula Sawicka.

Leaders of Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party,
including Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, have made guest appearances on Radio Maryja and its sister cable television station, Trwam, since they came to power last year.

During legislative elections in September last year, Radio Maryja, which claims to have three million listeners, openly backed PiS, which topped the poll, albeit without winning a parliamentary majority.

The Warsaw ghetto, set up in 1940 by Nazi Germany to isolate the thriving Jewish community in the Polish capital, originally contained almost 450,000 people.

But by January 1943, deportations, summary executions, starvation and disease had reduced it to around 37,000 people.

Edelman was one of the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which began on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, when the Nazis tried to resume deportations of the last remaining Jews in the ghetto to death camps.