The world is expected to pause on Thursday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camps, but the event will largely pass unmarked in South Africa.
No official observations are scheduled and South Africa will only be represented at the main international event, at Oswiecim, by its ambassador to Poland, Sikose Mji.
President Thabo Mbeki will be in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum.
Dozens of world leaders will be at Oswiecim, Poland, to remember the roughly 1,5-million people from all walks of life and from many parts of the world who died there.
The mass killings ended on January 27 1945, when the Soviet army arrived and the camps’ guards ran away.
The dying did not immediately end — hundreds died for weeks afterwards from illness and disease, or from the shock of eating real food after years of privation.
Many other Nazi death and concentration camps were overrun in 1945, but the Auschwitz complex, the largest of them all, has since become a metaphor for the Holocaust in which at least six million Jews — and hundreds of thousands of other people — were murdered between 1942 and 1945.
While not an official event, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies is hosting a function to commemorate the day at the Oxford Shul in Johannesburg on Thursday.
Many Holocaust and other concentration-camp survivors settled in South Africa after World War II and increasingly few are still alive.
One Auschwitz survivor, Vera Reitzer (84), was scheduled to reflect on her personal experiences at the Oxford Shul at 6.15pm.
Reitzer told a weekend paper she remembered being crammed with 79 other people, for three nights and three days, in a truck designed to carry eight horses while being deported from Yugoslavia to the death camp.
Once there, she slept on a 2m x 2m wooden plank with 12 other girls and survived on a daily meal of an unidentifiable ”black liquid”, a small piece of bread and something that resembled vegetable soup.
Spared immediate death, she was put to work to drag the bodies of men, women and children from the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
”When we opened the door, what we saw was like a pyramid. They had climbed on top of each other because they saw that the air [higher up] was better. We had to climb on these bodies to start taking them off one by one from the top,” she told the paper.
”There were gas chambers all over and the crematoriums worked day and night,” Reitzer recalled.
Auschwitz consisted of three main camps and more than 40 subsidiary facilities, where prisoners were worked to death while performing slave labour.
- Auschwitz I, opened in a former Polish army barracks in April 1940, held about 15 000 prisoners on average.
- Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, built about 3km from the original camp, was completed in March 1941 as an extermination centre. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre says on its website that the camp’s Nazi staff killed 6 000 people a day in four gas chamber and crematorium complexes.
- Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz or Buna, was an IG Farben petrochemical complex, similar to Sasol, where fuel was extracted from coal.
The Nizkor Project says historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1 100 000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, more than 140 000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20 000 Gypsies from several European countries, more than 10 000 Soviet prisoners of war, and more than 10 000 prisoners of other nationalities. — Sapa