Leaders to listen to Auschwitz survivors at 80th anniversary of camp's liberation
PHOTO CAPTION: A drone view of the "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free) gate is pictured on the site of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz prior to the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, January 10, 2025. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
By Barbara Erling and Kuba Stezycki
OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) -Auschwitz survivors were being joined by world leaders on Monday to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp by Soviet troops, one of the last such gatherings of those who experienced its horrors.
The anniversary at the site of the camp, which Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland during World War Two to murder European Jews, was being attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Britain's King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, Polish President Andrzej Duda and many other leaders.
They were not due to make speeches, but rather to listen for perhaps the last time to those who suffered and witnessed at first hand one of humanity's greatest atrocities.
Israel, founded for Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust, sent Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
"The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task, and in so doing we inform our present and shape our future," Charles said during a visit to the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow.
President Duda told reporters at the camp that "we Poles, on whose land the Germans built this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory".
Remembrance of crimes committed in the name of Nazi notions of racial superiority has become an acutely political issue in recent years with the rise of far-right parties across Europe.
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On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk, high-profile adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, made a video address to supporters of Germany's AfD (Alternative fuer Deutschland), which is running second in polls for the Feb. 23 election on a platform that includes playing down historical guilt for the Holocaust.
"Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents," said Musk, who himself laid a wreath at Auschwitz a year ago.
The rally prompted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to say that "the words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about 'Great Germany' and 'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous".
Pawel Sawicki, spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, said politicians would not make speeches on Monday.
"It is clear to all of us that this is the last milestone anniversary where we can have a group of survivors that will be visible who can be present at the site," he said.
"In 10 years, it will not happen, and for as long as we can we should listen to the voices of survivors, their testimonies, their personal stories. It is something that is of enormous significance when we talk about how the memory of Auschwitz is shaped."
The main commemoration was due to begin at 4 p.m. (1500 GMT) in a tent built over the gate to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
SURVIVORS OF CAMP WHERE MORE THAN A MILLION WERE MURDERED
Four survivors were scheduled to speak. Journalist and historian Marian Turski, 98, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 and survived the westward 'death march' to Buchenwald in 1945.
Author and academic Tova Friedman, 86, whose book 'The Daughter of Auschwitz' describes her experiences, was transported with her mother to the camp at just five.
Physician Leon Weintraub, 99, lived in the Lodz ghetto and was separated from his family and sent to Auschwitz in 1944.
And retired pharmacist Janina Iwanska, a Polish Catholic, was taken to Auschwitz in a freight train in 1944, after being expelled from her home during the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz, where most had been brought in freight wagons, packed like livestock.
More than three million of Poland's 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, along with gypsies, sexual minorities, the disabled and others who offended Nazi ideas of racial superiority.
Hungarian survivor Agnes Darvas, now 92, told Reuters in Budapest last week that the world had still not learnt the lessons of the Holocaust.
"People believe that if they commemorate, then these things will not happen. Well, this happens every day, perhaps not with Jews but some other ethnicities ... there has never been so much cruelty in the world."
(Reporting by Barbara Erling and Kuba Stezycki in Oswiecim, Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw, Michael Holden in London; Writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Stephen Coates and Kevin Liffey)
