OSWIEM, Poland (AP) — The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, an event widely seen as the last great passage. It is assumed that any significant number of survivors will be able to participate.
Nazi German forces killed approximately 1.1 million people at this site in southern Poland, which was occupied by Germany during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews who perished on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others targeted for extermination in Nazi racial ideology.
Elderly camp survivors, some wearing blue-and-white striped scarves reminiscent of their prison uniforms, walked together to the Wall of Death, where prisoners were hanged, including Included were many Poles who resisted the occupation of their country.
They were joined by Andrzej Duda, president of Poland, whose nation had lost 600,000 citizens during the war. He picked up a candle and walked with Piotr Siewski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. At the wall, the two men bowed their heads, muttered a prayer and crossed themselves.
“We were then occupied by the Nazi Germans – on whose land – the Germans built this waste industry and these concentration camps, today are the guardians of memory,” Duda told reporters afterwards.
He spoke of the “unimaginable loss” he had inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people.
“May the memory of all the dead live on, may they rest in peace,” he said.
In total, the Germans killed 600,000 Jews across Europe, killing two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Across Europe, officials and others were pausing to remember.
European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen, who is German, said on X, “As the last survivors die, it is our duty to Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and to honor the memories of the victims. To be respected.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who led the nation in self-defense against Russia’s brutal invasion, held a candle at the Beby Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kiev, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation.
“The evil that seeks to end the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” he wrote on his Telegram page.
Commemorations will conclude late Monday when world leaders and royalty will join the camp’s elderly survivors, the youngest in his 80s, in Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the bulk of the Jews lived. But he was killed.
However, politicians have not been asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, who are expected to be around 50, organizers are choosing to make them the focus of observation. Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.
Among the leaders expected to attend are German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. According to the German news agency DPA, Germany has never before sent its two top state representatives to the scene.
It’s a sign of Germany’s continued determination to take responsibility for the country’s crimes, even amid a growing right-wing movement that would like to forget.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will also attend, while Britain’s King Charles III will also attend, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway.
Russian representatives were among the main guests past the anniversary scenes in recognition of the Soviet liberation of the camp on January 27, 1945, and the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they are not welcome.
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Ilya Novikov in Kiev, Ukraine contributed to this report.
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