Around 300 survivors of the Auschwitz death camp gathered Tuesday to mark 70 years since its liberation by Soviet troops, joined by world leaders for a commemoration held in the shadow of war in Ukraine and a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe.
Holocaust survivor Igor Malitsky of Ukraine, left, touches his face while attending a ceremony at the Executions Wall, or Wall of Death, of the Auschwitz death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on Tuesday. (Czarek Sokolowski/Associated Press)
Tuesday’s gathering in southern Poland marks perhaps the last major anniversary that survivors of the Nazi German camp will be able to attend in numbers, given the youngest are now in their 70s. Some 1,500 attended the 60th anniversary.
Around 1.5 million people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged and burned at the camp in southern Poland during World War Two, before the Red Army entered its gates in winter 1945. It has become probably the most poignant symbol of a Holocaust that claimed six million Jewish lives across Europe.
The presidents of Poland, Germany, France and Ukraine are expected among hundreds of dignitaries. Notable for his absence will be Vladimir Putin, whose military intervention in Ukraine has helped drive West-Russia relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War.
Poland has been one of the most vociferous critics of Russia’s March annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Wary of the domestic political consequences, Poland did not send a full diplomatic invitation to Putin, sources have told Reuters.
Russia will be represented at the commemoration by Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov. Putin sent a message extolling the role of the Red Army in ending the Holocaust, saying it had “saved not just the Jewish people but also other peoples of Europe and the world.”
A Holocaust survivor stands outside the gate of the of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland on Tuesday. About 300 Holocaust survivors travelled to the camp for the 70th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. (Alik Keplicz/Associated Press)
France’s Francois Hollande makes the trip less than three weeks after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris in attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly newspaper and a kosher supermarket.
Four French Jews were among the dead, the latest victims of a recent spate of armed attacks on Jews in Europe.
European Jews warn of a growing under-current of anti-Semitism, fuelled by anger at Israeli policy in the Middle East and social tensions over issues of immigration, inequality and economic hardship that have contributed to a rise of far-right political movements, notably the grass-roots PEGIDA movement in Germany.
On the eve of the anniversary, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germans had an everlasting responsibility to fight all forms of anti-Semitism and racism.
“We’ve got to constantly be on guard to protect our freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Merkel said. “We’ve got to expose those who promote prejudices and conjure up bogeymen, the old ones as well as the new.”
The camp’s victims also included, among others, Roma, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
David Wisnia, an 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, said on Monday the Holocaust was “almost impossible for a human mind to comprehend.” A choir boy as a child at Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia will sing a memorial prayer in Hebrew on Tuesday.
“I pray to God that we as human beings are able to learn something from it,” he said.
Speaking to Canadian Holocaust survivors in Krakow, Poland on Tuesday, Tim Uppal, Canadas’s minister of state for multiculturalism, said: “We are determined to be at the forefront of the international fight against anti-Semitism, hatred intolerance and discrimination .”
“Our task is made only more critical at a time when anti-Semitism incidences of holocaust denial seem to be in the rise around the world,” he said.
Toronto resident Moshe Ronen, a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, told CBC News in Krakow before Tuesday’s anniversary ceremony: “I think it is pretty clear and scary that we wonder and we ask what the world learned 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.”
“Freedom of speech and freedom to express oneself should not guarantee the freedom to hate and be intolerant,” he said.
His father, Mordechai, now 82, was 11 years old when he was in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
“[People] don’t understand what can happen in the future. I hope it will never happen again what happened to my family,” he said.
“I am a victor, I am not a survivor. I am a victor and I live,” he added.
