World leaders will gather at Auschwitz in southern Poland tomorrow for the biggest ever commemoration of the darkest episode of Europe’s 20th century, the industrial murder at the camp of up to 1,5-million people, mainly Jews, by Nazi Germany.
Princes and presidents, surviving victims and the relatives of the dead, Red Army veterans who freed the camp in January 1945, schoolchildren and religious leaders will all travel to the bleak, sprawling concentration camp, which has come to symbolise the much broader Holocaust, to mark the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
Thursday’s ceremonies at Auschwitz and in the nearby city of Krakow kick off a year of events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the World War II. These 12 months will in many respects also be a year of closure since the various events will be the last to be attended by direct witnesses of the war years.
”We are on the brink of that moment when this terrible event will change — from memory to history,” Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister, said in New York on Monday at the United Natios’s first special general assembly session dedicated to recalling the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
”The number of survivors shrinks all the time,” Shalom added.
The presidents of Israel, Germany, Poland, Russia, and France will be among 30 heads of state converging on the town of Oswiecim (the Polish town better known by its German name of Auschwitz). Europe’s royal houses will also be well represented.
Washington is sending Vice-President Dick Cheney, while all three living former US presidents, Bill Clinton, George Bush senior, and Jimmy Carter, are also expected to attend.
Britain is sending Prince Edward and the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to the event, a level of representation that has raised eyebrows among some organisers and diplomats.
The Holocaust, the unique attempt to destroy European Jewry through the organised mass murder of six-million people, was largely accomplished in eastern Europe in the space between Germany and Russia, although it also claimed countless thousands of west-European victims.
The deliberate choice of eastern Europe as the killing field and the West’s indifference to the slaughter has been a theme this week of the speeches and ceremonies recalling the wickedness of the 1940s.
”The crime was meant to remain a secret,” said Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish MEP and former foreign minister. ”Nazi Germany chose Poland as the place of the massacre of European Jews … to conceal their crime from the world by committing it far from western Europe.”
Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor and Nobel prizewinner who is to speak at Thursday’s events, said the 60th anniversary should remember ”this shameful indifference”.
”Our tragedy might have been avoided, its scope surely diminished” had Britain and the US been more emphatic in initially resisting Hitler and more generous in their treatment of Jewish refugees, he said.
Some of the leaders attending tomorrow have painful personal connections with the camp. Pope John Paul, a former archbishop of the nearby city of Krakow, is being represented by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jewish convert to Catholicism whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz.
Also present will be Ukraine’s new president Viktor Yushchenko, whose father, a Red Army soldier, was also interned at the camp.
Recent events, notably the distasteful japes of Britain’s Prince Harry pictured wearing a Nazi uniform at a party earlier this month, and the outrage provoked by German neo-Nazi members walking out of the state Parliament of Saxony during a minute’s silence for the Holocaust victims last week, have drawn attention to the problem of increasing amnesia about the genocide.
Following his attendance at the D-Day commemorations in France last year, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is to go to Moscow in May for the staging of the events marking Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, while President Horst Köhler will be at Auschwitz on Thursday.
Vast labour and death camp killed up to 6 000 a day
German forces occupying Poland set up Auschwitz in 1940 as a labour camp for Polish prisoners, gradually expanding it into a vast labour and death camp
The complex contained three camps and at least 36 sub-camps, built outside the town of Oswiecim between 1940 and 1942:
Auschwitz I was built for Polish political prisoners in June 1940
Auschwitz II was built in October 1941. It held more than 100 000 prisoners and housed gas chambers capable of disposing of 2 000 people a day. By 1944 some 6 000 people a day were being killed
Auschwitz III supplied forced labour for the nearby IG Farben plant, the company which made the Zyklon-B gas used in Nazi death camps
Between 1,2-million and 1,5-million people died at the camps, of whom about a million were Jewish
Other groups who died included Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, people with disabilities, homosexuals and prisoners of conscience or religious faith
The camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27 1945
About 200 000 inmates of the camp between 1940 and 1945 survived
Out of a total of about 7 000 guards at Auschwitz, including 170 female staff, 750 were prosecuted and punished after Nazi Germany was defeated
Sources: Reuters/Oxford Companion to the Second World War/BBC – Guardian Unlimited Â