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The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony largely treated as the last major ceremony to be attended by a significant number of survivors.
Among those who traveled to the site was 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was six years old when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on January 27, 1945. She believes it will be the last gathering of Auschwitz survivors and came from her home in New Jersey to add her voice to those who warn of growing hatred and anti-Semitism.
“The world has become toxic,” she told The Associated Press a day before the commemoration in nearby Krakow. “I understand that we are in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred, so much mistrust, that if we don’t stop, it can get worse and worse. There can be another terrible destruction.”
Nazi German forces killed an estimated 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and others who were targeted for elimination in the 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 executed, including many Poles who resisted the occupation of their country.
Holocaust educators say that with more Holocaust misinformation spreading on social media, their work is more important than ever to ensure younger generations know what really happened.
They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens during the war. He carried a candle and walked with the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Piotr Cywinski. On the wall, two men bowed their heads, muttered prayers and crossed themselves.
“We Poles, on whose land — which was occupied by German Nazis at the time — the Germans built this industry of extermination and this concentration camp, today we are the custodians of memory,” Duda told reporters afterward.
He spoke of the “unimaginable damage” done to so many people, especially the Jewish people.
‘Our duty… to remember’
In total, the Germans killed six million Jews from all over Europe, destroying two-thirds of European Jews and one-third of all Jews in the world. In 2005, the United Nations declared January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Across Europe, officials and others paused to remember.
“As the last survivors fade, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and honor the memory of the victims,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, said at X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia’s brutal invasion, lit a candle a day earlier in Kiev at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation. He arrived in Poland on Monday to attend the commemoration.
“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still exists in the world,” he wrote on his Telegram page.
Commemorations will culminate later on Monday when world leaders and royals will join elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s, at Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the mass killings of Jews took place.
Politicians, however, were not asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, who are expected to be around 50, the organizers decided to make them the center of the commemoration. Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.
World leaders attend, including Trudeau
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was expected to attend.
Before the ceremony, Trudeau met with Canadian survivors of Auschwitz who also traveled to Poland. This could be Trudeau’s last major international trip as prime minister before the next Liberal Party leader is elected on March 9.
In a statement published on Sunday Xwrote Trudeau, “80 years ago, the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp and extermination camp was liberated, ending the systematic murder and genocide carried out by the Nazi regime there.”
“Tomorrow, I will join fellow world leaders on the grounds of Auschwitz Birkenau to honor the victims of the Holocaust, confront rising anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and reaffirm our promise: never again.”
Other leaders who will attend include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never before sent both of its top state representatives to the ceremony, according to the German news agency dpa.
It’s a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to taking responsibility for its nation’s crimes, even with a far-right party that has gained increasing support in recent years.
French President Emmanuel Macron will attend after previously holding a minute’s silence at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic tomb for the six million Jews who have no graves, and meeting with a survivor of Auschwitz and one from the Bergen-Belsen camp.
Britain’s King Charles III will also be there, along with the kings and queens of Spain, Denmark and Norway.
In the past, Russian representatives were central guests at the anniversary commemoration 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 they are not welcome since a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to participants, saying: “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who destroyed this terrible, total evil and won a victory whose greatness will forever remain in world history.”
“Citizens of Russia are the direct descendants and heirs of the generation of winners,” Putin said. “We will continue to oppose attempts to rewrite the legal and moral judgment of the Nazi butchers and their helpers in a principled and firm way.”
Eighty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, David Moscovic shares his story of survival and says he is disturbed by what he saw on the day of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
