World leaders and death-camp survivors mourned victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on Thursday, gathering at the place where Nazi doctors once sent new arrivals to the gas chambers.
Candles flickered in the winter gloom atop the track leading into the vast, snow-covered camp at Birkenau. The ceremony opened with the sound of an approaching train.
Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Moshe Katsav of Israel were to speak at the ceremony.
Germany’s President Horst Koehler attended but was to remain silent in token acknowledgement of his country’s role as perpetrator of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s murder of six million Jews during World War II.
Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz and the neighbouring camp at Birkenau, or Brzezinka in Polish, on January 27 1945. About 1,5-million people, most of them Jews, had died at the two camps from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.
Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
The ceremony was held on Thursday on the spot where new arrivals were subject to ”selection” — meaning a few were deemed able to be worked to death while most were taken immediately to the gas chambers.
Girl Scouts brought blankets to elderly survivors sitting in the freezing cold and heavy snowfall.
”For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe,” said survivor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Poland’s foreign minister.
When he arrived in 1940, he recalled, ”I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II.”
Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak (80) said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened.
”Today I’m remembering my father, gassed here. I’m remembering the atrocious things they did to us here,” said Jozefiak, who is from Krakow. ”I drank water from a dirty pool and, to punish me, an SS man jumped on my arm and broke it and jumped on my chest and broke two ribs.”
One day, he said, the Nazi guards lined them up and told some to go right, others left. He went left and his father went right and was taken to the gas chamber.
”The message today is: no more Auschwitz,” Jozefiak said. ”But the world has learned nothing so far — you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere in the world.
”Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget,” he warned.
Earlier, at a youth forum in Krakow, participants applauded several surviving Soviet soldiers awarded for liberating the camp, and saw a video message from 92-year-old Major Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the Soviet unit that captured Auschwitz. He was too sick to travel from his home in New York.
”I would like to say to all the people on the Earth: unite, and do not permit this evil that was committed,” Shapiro said in the recorded greeting. ”This should never be repeated, ever.”
Memorial day
Meanwhile, January 27 should be designated a Holocaust memorial day throughout the European Union, the EU Parliament said on Thursday.
In a resolution passed unanimously, the European Parliament condemned ignorance among the young concerning ”the most shameful and painful pages of the history of our continent”.
Expressing disquiet about a ”disturbing rise in anti-Semitism and especially anti-Semitic incidents in Europe”, MEPs said the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp should be remembered in all EU nations.
Several EU countries already mark January 27 as a day of remembrance for Jewish and other victims of the Nazis, including Germany, Austria, Belgium and Britain. Others, such as Italy, mark the Holocaust on other days.
At the Auschwitz commemoration ceremony, European Commission president Jose Manuel said the EU project is the most fitting riposte to Hitler’s murderous vision of conquest in Europe.
”A Europe united, strong and inclusive constitutes the response to the barbarism of World War II and to the human tragedy symbolised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp,” he said in a statement.
European Parliament president Josep Borrell, who was also due at the commemorative event, said the lessons of Auschwitz bear repeating always.
”Today we must continue the fight against those things which made it possible: anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, interracial hatred and indifference in part of our society,” he said.
”We must know what happened and why, and we must not remember too late.” — Sapa-AFP, Sapa-AP