The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend.
Among those who traveled to the site is Tova Friedman, 86, who was 6 years old when she was among the 7,000 people freed on January 27, 1945. She believes it will be the last gathering of survivors at Auschwitz and came from her home in New Jersey to add their voice to those warning about the rise of hate and anti-Semitism.
“The world has become toxic,” he told The Associated Press a day before the observances in nearby Krakow. “I realize that we are in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred, so much distrust, that if we do not stop, it can get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the siege in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews murdered on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual people and others who were targeted for elimination in Nazi racial ideology.
Elderly camp survivors, some wearing blue and white striped scarves reminiscent of their prison uniforms, walked together to the death wall, where prisoners, including Poles who resisted the occupation of their country, were executed.
They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens during the war. He carried a candle and walked with the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Piotr Cywinski. On the wall, the two men bowed their heads, murmured prayers, and passed each other.
“We the poles, on whose land, occupied by Nazi Germans at that time, the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory,” Duda told reporters afterwards.
He spoke of the “unimaginable harm” inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people.
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In total, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews throughout Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe's Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Across Europe, officials and others paused to remember.
“As the last survivors fade away, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and honor the memories of the victims,” European Commission President Ursula von Le Leyen, who is German, said in X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, addressing a nation defending itself against Russia's brutal invasion, placed a candle at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial a day earlier in kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the occupation Nazi. On Monday he arrived in Poland to attend the commemorations.
“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” he wrote on his telegram page.
The commemorations will culminate when world leaders and royalty will join elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom is 80, in Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the mass murder of Jews took place. .
Politicians, however, have not been asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom are expected, organizers choose to make them the center of the observances. Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.
Among the leaders expected to attend are German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never sent its two highest state representatives to the observances before, according to German news agency DPA.
It is a sign of Germany's continued commitment to taking responsibility for the nation's crimes, even with a far-right party gaining greater support in recent years.
French President Emmanuel Macron will attend after paying his respects at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic grave for the 6 million Jews who do not have a grave, and meeting with an Auschwitz survivor and one from the Bergen-Belsen camp .
Britain's King Charles III will also be there, along with kings and queens of Spain, Denmark and Norway.
Russian representatives were in the past central guests at anniversary observances in recognition of the liberation of the Red Army camp on January 27, 1945, and the heavy losses of Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcomed since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to participants saying: “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this evil evildoer and won the victory, whose greatness will forever remain in world history.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Thursday: “There is something that needs to be said to the organizers and all the Europeans who will be there: their lives, their work and leisure, the very existence of their nations, their children, their children. They have been paid by Soviet soldiers, their lives, their blood.
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