WARSAW, Poland - Polish authorities say that eight shoes that once belonged to Holocaust victims have been stolen from the former concentration camp Majdanek in Poland, now a state-run museum.

The Polish news agency PAP reported Tuesday that police believe the theft occurred between Nov. 18 and Nov. 20, when a museum employee discovered that a metal net that protected an exhibit of shoes had been cut and the shoes were missing.

The exhibit consists of 56,000 shoes that belonged to Jews killed at the death camp, which was operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II.

Such exhibitions, which can be found at Auschwitz and other Holocaust memorial sites, aim to give viewers a sense of the huge proportion of the Nazi crimes.