After a Minneapolis, Minn. restaurant hosted a Nazi-themed party on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, an unofficial group has organized a counter-event to protest the original dinner, according to Minneapolis City Pages.
Margie Newman and Susan Schwaidelson Siegfried organized an unofficial group to meet outside of Gasthof Zur Gemütlichkeit on Wednesday evening to honor Holocaust victims.
“It’s going to be a silent flash mob re-enacting a deportation as a continuation of the Nazi dinner that was held there, so we’ll wear yellow stars or triangles or whatever people identify with,” Newman told City Pages, the Minneapolis alt weekly. “We’re there to just speak to the other part of the re-enactment. There’s no Nazi World War II story without the victims, so we just want to add that piece to it.”
Earlier in March, restaurant owner Mario Pierzchalski defended the event, a Christmas party held by the Twin Cities historical society for the past six years. He said it was merely a dinner for World War II re-enactors. However, he told the Star Tribune that he’ll no longer hold the event.
“We live in a free country…but from the comments I see, a lot of people they don’t see what freedom is. If I break the law, punish me. But we did this for so many years and everything was fine,” Pierzchalski told the Star Tribune earlier in March.
City Pages also reported, though, that the organizer behind the Nazi-themed event has an SS tattoo.
Image courtesy of City Pages
