Thief Makes Off With Holocaust Victims' Shoes

Director James Cameron made it to the world's deepest spot a couple of years ago, but a thief in Poland has found a way to sink even lower: stealing the shoes of people murdered by the Nazis 70 years ago. Police say at least eight shoes were stolen from an exhibit at the Majdanek extermination camp-turned-museum, where at least 78,000 people were killed in gas chambers between 1941 and 1944, the BBC reports. The theft, which occurred between Nov. 18 and 20, was discovered after an employee found that a metal net protecting an exhibit had been cut, the AP reports.

The theft is "a great loss to the museum," a spokesman says, explaining that Majdanek has 56,000 shoes of Holocaust victims on display to help visitors grasp the sheer scale of the atrocities that took place there. This isn't the first theft from Majdanek, the BBC notes: The ashes of victims were taken in 1989 and never recovered. Last year a stolen prisoner's hat was returned after it surfaced in an eBay auction in the US. In Germany, police are still looking for the thieves who stole the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from Dachau about a month ago. (More Poland stories.)