World leaders were on Thursday to stand side-by-side with about 1 000 survivors of the Auschwitz death camp for an emotional ceremony under a blanket of snow to mark the camp’s liberation 60 years ago.
A train pulling along the tracks once used to herd more than a million people in cattle trucks to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland was to signal the start of the ceremony, set to issue a plea never to let the horrors of the Holocaust happen again.
Amid sub-zero temperatures, which have already forced delays to the arrival of some participants, 10 000 people were expected to pay tribute to the at least 1,1-million people who died at Auschwitz.
Most of them were Jews exterminated in the gas chambers of the most grimly efficient of the Nazi death camps. They were among the six million people who perished during the Nazi’s chilling ”Final Solution”.
In a declaration delivered to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, United States President George Bush on Wednesday called on the world to unite in the fight against anti-Semitism.
The 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp is ”a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to oppose evil wherever it exists”, he said.
”For almost five years, Auschwitz was a factory for murder where more than a million lives were taken,” he said, urging the world ”never to forget the cruelty of the guilty and the courage of the victims at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps”.
US Vice-President Dick Cheney was to be among world leaders at the event, who will also be joined by Red Army soldiers who liberated the camp on January 27 1945.
The open-air ceremony, also being attended by members of European royalty, will be held at a memorial erected at the camp’s Birkenau complex, between the ruins of two of gas chambers that were capable of claiming thousands of lives every day.
Because many of the camp’s victims were ”selected” by the SS for immediate extermination in specially built gas chambers, they were never registered at Auschwitz, making it impossible for historians to say precisely how many people died here. The actual death toll is believed to be as high as two million.
On Thursday, Kwasniewski said the lessons learnt from Auschwitz have to be constantly repeated, not only during special ceremonies.
”When I see ethnic purges in the Balkans or what is happening in some African countries, I have to note that, unfortunately, the message of Auschwitz has not been heeded,” Kwasniewski told Polish radio.
”We must constantly remind each other of the message, not only when there are ceremonies like the one today,” he said.
Thursday’s commemorations began at 9.30am (8.30am GMT) with a forum organised by the European Jewish Congress bringing young people from around the world face to face with survivors of Auschwitz and the former Soviet soldiers who freed the camp, many of them in their eighties.
It could mark ”the last chance we have to gather this cross-section of people together in the same room”, Moshe Kantor, chairperson of the European Jewish Congress, said on the eve of the anniversary.
At the forum, Kwasniewski was due to decorate several former Red Army soldiers who liberated the camp during one of eastern Europe’s severest winters when temperatures fell as low as -30 degrees Celsius.
The main ceremony was to begin at 2.30pm (1.30pm GMT) at the memorial 3km from the main camp.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Ukraine’s new leader, Viktor Yushchenko, arrived in Krakow on Wednesday, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrival was put back to Thursday morning because of the snowstorm.
About 3 000 police have been mobilised and the road linking Krakow to Auschwitz, 60km to the west, was sealed off from the early hours of the morning.
Among those who will address the gathering are three former prisoners of the camp. Former Polish foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski will speak on behalf of Polish prisoners, French lawmaker Simone Veil on behalf of Jews, and Romani Rose, of Germany’s Council of Roms, for European gypsies.
Meanwhile, Britain’s chief rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks made a plea to remember the Holocaust and its lessons without hate.
”Hate destroys the hated, but it destroys the hater even more,” the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
”The lessons of the Holocaust are simple to understand, however hard they are to live. Never blame others for your troubles. A society is as large as the space it makes for the stranger. Cherish life. Fight for the rights of others,” he wrote. — Sapa-AFP