The 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is marked on Monday on the site of the former death camp, a ceremony which is largely treated as the last major celebration according to which any notable number of survivors will be able to attend.
Among those who went to the site, there is Tova Friedman, 86, who was 6 years old when she was among the 7,000 people released on January 27, 1945. She thinks that it will be the last gathering of survivors to Auschwitz and she came from her house in New Jersey to add her voice to these warnings about the increase in hatred and anti -Semitism.
“The world has become toxic,” she told the Associated Press one day before observances in Krakow nearby. “I realize that we are again in crisis, that there is so much hatred, so much distrust, that if we do not stop, it can get worse and more. There may be another terrible destruction. »»
The Nazi German forces assassinated some 1.1 million people on the site of southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the Second World War. Most victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also posts, Roma, Soviet prisoners, homosexuals and other targeted people for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology .
The survivors of the elderly camp, some wearing blue and white striped scarves that remember their prison uniforms, went together to the death wall, where prisoners were executed, including posts that resisted the occupation of their country.
They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens during the war. He wore a candle and walked with the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Piotr Cywinski. On the wall, the two men bowed his head, whispered prayers and crossed.
“We, the poles, on the lands of which – occupied by Nazi Germans at the time – the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of the memory,” said Duda to journalists thereafter.
He spoke of “unimaginable damage” inflicted on so many people, especially of the Jewish people.
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In all, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, destroying two thirds of European Jews and a third of all Jews around the world. In 2005, the United Nations designated on January 27 of the International Day of the Souvenir of the Holocaust.
Throughout Europe, managers and others stopped to remember.
“While the last survivors are fading, it is our duty as a European to remember unspeakable crimes and to honor the memories of the victims,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, on X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is leading a nation defending itself against the brutal invasion of Russia, has placed a candle for the Babyn Holocaust Yar one day before in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation. On Monday, he arrived in Poland to attend the commemorations.
“The evil that seeks to destroy the life of whole nations remains in the world,” he wrote on his telegram page.
The commemorations will culminate when the world leaders and the Royags will join the survivors of the elderly, whose youngest was in the 1980s, in Birkenau, the role of Auschwitz where the mass murder of the Jews took place.
Politicians, however, were not invited to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of survivors, around 50, the organizers choose the observance center. Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.
Among the leaders who are expected to assist there are the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never sent its two highest state representatives to observances before, according to the German news agency DPA.
It is a sign of Germany’s continuous commitment to assume responsibility for the country’s crimes, even with a far -right party, he has obtained increased support in recent years.
French president Emmanuel Macron will attend tribute to the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic tomb for the 6 million Jews who have no tomb and to meet a survivor of Auschwitz and one from the Bergen-Belsen camp.
British king Charles III will also be there, as well as kings and queens of Spain, Denmark and Norway.
The Russian representatives were in the former central guests during anniversary observances in recognition of the release of the Red Army of the camp on January 27, 1945 and the enormous losses of the Soviet forces in the allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome since the large -scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022.
The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had sent a message to the participants saying: “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible and total and winning, whose greatness will forever remain in world history. “
Russian Ministry of Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a briefing on Thursday: “There is something that must be said to the organizers and all the Europeans who will be there: your life, your work and your leisure , the very existence of your nations, your children, your children were paid by Soviet soldiers, their life, their blood. »»
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press
