Auschwitz liberation at 80: Survivors, world leaders mark milestone

Voice of America

27-01-2025

Around 50 survivors and dozens of world leaders attended memorial events at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on Monday to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet Red Army in World War II.
January 27 is marked around the world as International Holocaust Memorial Day. Six million people were killed in the Holocaust as the Nazis attempted to eliminate the Jewish race.
In front of the so-called 'Death Gate,' through which more than a million Jews and other prisoners were led to their deaths, the survivors gathered in a heated tent, joined by heads of state and delegates from across the world.
They lit candles and laid wreaths of remembrance for the estimated 1.1 million people who perished at the camp.
Tova Friedman, who was 2 years old when she was taken to the camp at Auschwitz, is the youngest of the survivors.
'We were victims in a moral vacuum,' she told delegates. 'But today, however, we have an obligation not only to remember, which is very, very important, but also to warn and to teach that hatred only begets more hatred.'
Auschwitz liberation
On Jan. 27, 1945, Red Army troops liberated Auschwitz, the largest of the six Nazi extermination camps. What they found continues to haunt humanity.
Industrial-scale human slaughter spread across a vast factory complex of dormitories, gas chambers, crematoria and mass graves — the apparatus of a regime determined to wipe out the entire Jewish race. A genocide conducted over 4-and-a-half years, planned and executed with meticulous detail.
It was part of the Nazis' 'final solution to the Jewish problem' — a strategy of mass murder agreed at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.
An estimated 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, around 960,000 of them Jews. Poles, Roma, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war and other nationalities were also murdered in the thousands.
Victims were stripped of their clothing and forced into packed chambers filled with cyanide-based Zyklon-B gas. By summer 1944, an estimated 12,000 people a day were being gassed to death.
Thousands of others were shot or beaten to death or died from disease, starvation and exposure. Bodies were burned or buried in mass graves.
'Burning bodies'
Janina Iwanska was taken to Auschwitz by train from another Polish transit camp in August 1944 at age 14.
'As soon as I got off the wagon, I was immediately hit by the smell, the one I knew from Treblinka [concentration camp] — the smell of burning bodies,' she told Reuters.
'There were small children there who were brought with their mothers. After leaving the 'disinfection' room, they were separated, torn off them. The mothers almost ripped the hands of these children off because they did not want to let them go. Besides, some of the children could not recognize their mothers, because not only were the clothes different but also the heads. A shaved head and a head with hair are two completely different heads,' Iwanska said.
As Red Army troops approached the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp from the east, Nazi soldiers attempted to cover up their crimes. Around 60,000 prisoners were forcibly transferred in so-called "death marches" to other camps farther west. It's estimated that up to 15,000 died along the way.
By the time the Russian troops entered Auschwitz, around 7,000 prisoners remained, most on the brink of death. Thousands died before receiving medical help.
'Culture of remembrance'
Germany now embraces 'Erinnerungskultur,' an official "culture of remembrance," or a duty to take responsibility for the Holocaust.
'We keep alive the memory of the breach of civilization committed by Germans in the Holocaust and convey it to every generation in our country again and again. Our responsibility never ends,' German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said ahead of the anniversary.
But the 80th anniversary comes amid growing fears over the rise of the far-right in Germany, Europe and beyond. Such concerns were voiced by many Auschwitz survivors, including Leon Weintraub, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and now lives in Sweden.
"Be attentive and be vigilant,' Weintraub told delegates. 'We, the survivors, we understand that the consequences of being considered different is active persecution, the effects of which we have personally experienced on our own skin. So, let us be very serious, and let us take seriously what the enemies of democracy preach. They generally seek to implement these slogans they promote,' he said.
German fears
The German government has repeatedly warned of the dangers of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, which is polling in second place, or around 20%, ahead of February elections. The AfD is being monitored by German intelligence services as a potentially 'extremist' party.
In a recent televised conversation with Elon Musk, the U.S. billionaire and ally of President Donald Trump, AfD's leader Alice Weidel said Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not right-wing but a 'communist.'
Speaking at an AfD conference Saturday by video link, Musk, who is an open supporter of the party, questioned Germany's approach to its past.
'I think there's frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even let alone their parents, the great-grandparents, maybe even,' Musk said.
Israel conflict
The Hamas cross-border attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the brutal Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, have overshadowed memorial events in Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not attend the Auschwitz commemorations. Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for suspected war crimes committed during Israel's war on Hamas, which he strongly denies. The United States, a close ally of Israel, has condemned the warrant and threatened sanctions against the court in The Hague.
Poland assured Netanyahu that he would not be arrested if he attended the Auschwitz memorial events. However, the Israeli prime minister instead spent Monday in a Tel Aviv court as his long-running corruption trial resumed. Israel was instead represented by Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
Relatives of the dozens of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza traveled to Poland for the Auschwitz liberation anniversary, while survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre joined survivors of the Holocaust for commemorative events in Israel.