Hijab-wearing Muslim girls spat on and racially abused during Holocaust study trip to Poland

A group of Muslim students from Berlin, who were on a study trip to Holocaust memorials in eastern Poland, alleged that they were racially abused by locals.

The hijab-wearing girls were allegedly spat on, threatened with knife and banned from entering shops in Lublin. They also accused police of witnessing their abuse, but taking no action. However, Lublin police said they received no complaint.

One girl from the group reportedly told a German radio station on Tuesday (27 June) that she was asked to leave a shop after she was heard speaking over the phone in Persian. "They came up to me and said 'can you leave, you're disturbing the people here'. And I thought: Why? Just because I'm speaking Persian and I'm a foreigner? Yes," she told Deutschlandfunk radio.

Another girl said a man spat on her in a street as police stood nearby watching the misbehaviour with a grin. They did nothing to apprehend the miscreant, the girl added.

Another member of the group said that "a woman just came up to me [in Lodz] and shouted 'get out!' and threw her drink over me and my camera - she said 'get lost!'"

The girls also said that one of them was threatened with a knife. A market stallholder also refused to sell them water because they were foreigners, the schoolgirls added.

However, Lublin police denied any such incidents took place. "The trip participants did not report any complaints to Lublin police officers," the Polish police force said in a statement and added that they examined CCTV footage of the alleged incidents but found "no incident involving foreigners".

The girl students were among a group of 20 children, mostly Muslims, from the Theodor Heuss Community School in Berlin-Moabit. The trip was arranged by a German Holocaust memorial body, the House of the Wannsee Conference.

Hans-Christian Jasch, the body's director told the BBC that they were shocked such incident happened to the young students. He added that he plans to complain to the Polish embassy in Berlin.

"I'm especially shocked that this happened to youngsters in our care on this trip - indeed, on a trip dedicated to studying this very topic [racism]. Of course that's particularly sad."