WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The world’s attention will be focused Monday on survivors of Nazi Germany’s atrocities as world leaders and royalty join them in commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of ‘Auschwitz.
The main celebrations take place at the site in southern Poland where Nazi Germany murdered more than a million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war , homosexuals and others targeted by Adolf Hitler’s racial ideology. .
This anniversary has become even more poignant because of the advanced age of the survivors and the awareness that they will soon be gone, even as the growing war makes their warnings more relevant than ever.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum says it expects about 50 survivors from Auschwitz and other camps to attend Monday afternoon’s events, joined by political leaders and family members royal.
On this occasion, the powerful will sit down and listen to the voices of the former prisoners, while there is still time to hear them.
Auschwitz, the labor and death camp
German authorities founded the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940 in the Polish town of Oswiecim after their invasion of Poland in 1939. At first it was a camp for Polish prisoners, among whom were Catholic priests and members of the Polish underground resistance. The Germans later established around 40 camps in the region, but the most infamous was Birkenau, a vast site used for massacres in gas chambers.
Those arriving at Birkenau were brought in cramped, windowless cattle trains. On the famous ramp, the Nazis selected those they could use as forced laborers. The others – elderly people, women, children and babies – were gassed to death shortly after their arrival.
In total, the Germans murdered 6 million Jews, two-thirds of all Jews in Europe, during the Holocaust at Auschwitz and other camps, in ghettos, and in mass executions near the homes.
Liberated by the Red Army
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops arrived at the gates of Auschwitz and found some 7,000 prisoners weak and emaciated.
Boris Polevoy, correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Pravda and the first eyewitness, described a scene of incredible suffering: “I saw thousands of tortured people whom the Red Army had saved – people so thin that they swung like branches in the wind, people whose age one cannot guess.
At the time, Allied troops were moving across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany. Soviet troops first liberated the Majdanek camp near Lublin in July 1944, then liberated Auschwitz, Stutthof and others.
Meanwhile, American and British forces liberated the camps in the west, including Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen.
After Liberation Day, some prisoners died of illness. Many faced the grief of murdered parents and children, spouses and siblings. Entire families were wiped out.
“For Jewish survivors, Liberation Day is a very, very sad day,” Havi Dreifuss, a Holocaust historian at Tel Aviv University, said in a recent online discussion about the anniversary.
Auschwitz, the memorial site
Today the site is a Polish state-run museum and memorial and one of the most visited sites in Poland. Its mission is to preserve the objects and the memory of what happened there; it organizes guided tours and its historians carry out research. In 2024, more than 1.83 million people have visited the site.
The museum’s challenges are enormous and include efforts to preserve barracks and other objects that were never intended to last long. A particularly moving project concerns the conservation of shoes of murdered children.
Auschwitz, symbol of all Nazi terror
Auschwitz is not only the place where 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jews, were massacred. He also occupies an important place in the world’s collective memory as the embodiment of all Nazi crimes and an example of what hatred, racism and anti-Semitism can lead to.
One of the reasons why Auschwitz became the main symbol of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes is that it was also a labor camp and thousands of people survived, eyewitnesses able to tell the world what happened there.
“Relatively many people survived, which is, for example, rarely the case in sites that did not have such a forced labor component,” said Thomas Van de Putte, a researcher specializing in the cultural and collective memory of the Holocaust at King’s College London.
Up to 900,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Treblinka between 1942 and 1943, and massacres also took place at Belzec and other camps, but the Germans sought to cover up evidence of their crimes and there were almost no survivors.
At Auschwitz, the Germans left behind barracks and watchtowers, the remains of gas chambers, and the hair and personal belongings of those killed there. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work will set you free) gate is recognized throughout the world.
In Birkenau, what remains has also left traces in the collective consciousness. As Van der Putte notes: “You have the door, you have the cart. There is the incredibly long railway platform which leads to the old crematoria and gas chambers.
Who will
Presidents, royalty, ambassadors, rabbis and priests will join survivors in a heated tent set up in Birkenau on Monday afternoon.
Germany, a country that has for decades expressed remorse for crimes committed under Hitler, will be represented by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Also present will be the president of Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, and of Italy, whose dictator Benito Mussolini formed an alliance with Hitler.
Other participants include Polish President Andrzej Duda, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Britain’s King Charles III, who has long worked to promote Holocaust remembrance, will also attend alongside other members of the European royal family, including Spain’s King Felipe VI.
Who won’t be there
Russian President Vladimir Putin was a guest of honor at the 60th anniversary in 2005, a testament to the Soviet role in the liberation of Auschwitz and the heavy price paid by Soviet troops in defeating Germany.
But he is no longer welcome because of Russian aggression in Ukraine. This will be the third year in a row – after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – without any Russian representatives.
“It’s the anniversary of the liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom. It is difficult to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom,” said museum director Piotr Cywiński.
The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has also caused a stir over whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will participate. The International Criminal Court, the highest court in the world for war crimes, issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu in November, accusing him of crimes against humanity for Israeli actions in Gaza. This meant that Poland, as a signatory, would have been obliged to stop it.
Ultimately, the Polish government adopted a resolution pledging to ensure the safe participation of Israel’s highest officials. Israel, however, is sticking to its plan to send its Minister of Education, Yoav Kisch.
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Danica Kirka in London and Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
