Survivors of Auschwitz deliver warning from history as memories die out

Their number decreases but the voices of Auschwitz survivors remain powerful.

“We were stripped of all humanity,” said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of four who spoke next to the famous death door of the Birkenau extermination camp.

World leaders and European royalty rubbed shoulders with 56 survivors of the genocide of European Hitler Jews on Monday when they have marked 80 years since his release.

“We were victims in a moral vacuum,” said Tova Friedman, who described the testimony of the horrors of Nazi persecution as a five -year -old girl hung by her mother’s hand.

She described the surveillance of her hiding place in a labor camp, “while all my boyfriends were gathered and pushed to their death, while the heartbreaking cries of their parents fell into the deaf ear “.

History warnings were clear: the survivors that anyone understood the risks of intolerance, and anti -Semitism was the canary of the coal mine.

In a huge white tent that covered the entrance to the death camp, Leon Weintraub in particular called young people to be “sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment towards different people”

The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.

Nearly a million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet war prisoners and an unknown number of gay men.

It was one of the six death camps that the Nazis built in Poland occupied in 1942, and it was by far the largest.

Another survivor to speak was Janina Iwanska, 94, a Catholic who was arrested as a child during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. She remembered the way Josef Mengele was so-called Nazi at their death in Birkenau because he No longer needed dead medical experiences.

Marian Turski, 98, said that only a few had survived the death camp and now they were just a handful. His thoughts turned to the millions of victims “who will never tell us what they experienced or felt, simply because they were consumed by this massive destruction”.

The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, pronounced a plea to protect the memory from what had happened, while the survivors died out.

“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides … Without memory, you have no history, no experience, nothing reference,” he said, while survivors listened to, Many of them wearing blue and white striped scarves to symbolize prisoners’ clothes.

Memory was the watchword of this day, marked in the world as the day of the International Holocaust Memorial.

Polish President Andrzej Duda promised that Poland could be responsible for preserving the memory of the six death camps on its territory, in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno.

“We are the memory guards,” said Duda, after laying a crown on the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed in Auschwitz 1, the concentration camp at 3 km (1.85 mile) of Birkenau.

Far from the entrance to a Nazi death camp at the United Nations in New York, secretary general António Guterres said that “the memory is not only a moral act, it is a call for action” And warned that the denial of the holocaust propagated and that hatred was stirred around the world.

He quoted the Italian survivor Primo Levi who wrote his memories of the camps for posterity but could not bear the scars of what he had witnessed. According to the words of his surviving colleague Elie Wiesel, Levi “died in Auschwitz 40 years later”.

Among those who went to the south of Poland for the commemoration of Monday of the day when the Red Army released Auschwitz were King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain and the King of Denmark Frederik and Queen Mary.

Charles III became the first British monarch at the service to visit Auschwitz, and we could see tears wiping by listening to the accounts of the four survivors.

While visiting the camp, he posed a crown in memory of the victims.

Sources close to the king said it was a deep visit to him, and an assistant described him as a “deeply personal pilgrimage”.

A few hours earlier, he said he remembered that the “ailments of the past” remained a “vital task”.

Visiting the Jewish community center in Krakow, which he opened 17 years ago, the king said that the Jewish community in Krakow had been “renamed” from the Holocaust ashes, and that the construction of a more world Nice and more compassionate for future generations was the “sacred task of all of us”.

The British survivor of Polish origin Mala Tribich, 94, was released from the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen and attended the event on Monday in Auschwitz.

“We have seen the consequences of camps and blows and hatred,” she told the BBC. “And what [children] are taught in the circumstances of a despot can be so damaging, not only for them but for everything. So we really have to protect ourselves. “”

Lord Pickles, the UK’s special envoy for post-holocaust issues, who is president of the Holocaust International Remembrance Alliance, warned that “distortion” threatened the heritage and historical truth of the holocaust .

Having listened to the survivors inside Birkenau’s tent, he told the BBC that “we have seen a transfer of memory in history”, because it was now very unlikely that the survivors pronounce speeches longer .

“It’s very intimidating and I don’t think we are in a post-holocaust world.”

An investigation in eight countries published last week suggested a widespread belief that another holocaust could reproduce. The concern was particularly high in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to the survey of 1,000 people in each conference in the country for complaints.

Additional Laura Gozzi report in London.