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The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops will be marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony widely regarded as the last major observance that any significant number of survivors can attend.
Among those who traveled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on January 27, 1945. She believes it will be the last meeting of survivors in Auschwitz and she came from her home in New Jersey to add her voice to those warning about growing hatred and anti-Semitism.
“The world has become toxic,” she told The Associated Press a day before the observations in nearby Krakow. “I realize 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 may be another terrible destruction. “
Nazi German troops killed about 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 who were 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 Poles who resisted the occupation of their country.
They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens in the war. He carried a candle and walked with the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Piotr Cywinski. At the wall the two men bowed their heads, muttered prayers and crossed themselves.
“We Poles, on whose land – occupied by Nazi Germans at that time – the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory,” Duda told reporters afterwards.
He spoke of the “unimaginable damage” inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people.
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In all, the Nazi regime killed 6 million Jews from all over Europe, exterminating two-thirds of European Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
All over Europe, officials and others stopped to remember.
“As the last survivors disappear, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and to honor the memories of the victims,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, said on X .
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia’s brutal invasion, placed a candle a day earlier at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial in Kiev, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi -occupation. On Monday he came to Poland to attend the commemorations.
“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” he wrote on his Telegram page.
Commemorations will culminate when world leaders and royalty will join elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s, in Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the mass killing of Jews took place.
However, politicians were not asked to speak this year. Due to the high age of the survivors, of whom about 50 are expected, the organizers choose to make them the center of the observations. Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.
Among the leaders expected to attend are German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never before sent its two highest state representatives to the observations, according to the German news agency dpa.
It is a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation’s crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years.
French President Emmanuel Macron will attend after paying his respects at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic grave for the 6 million Jews who have no grave, and meet with a survivor from Auschwitz and one from the Bergen camp – Bells.
The British King Charles III will also be there, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway.
Russian representatives were in the past central guests at the anniversary celebration in recognition of the liberation of the Red Army from the camp on January 27, 1945 and the great losses of the Soviet troops in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome since Russia’s full 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 crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which is forever in the world history remains.”
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a briefing on Thursday: “There is something to be said to the organizers and all the Europeans who will be there: your life, your work and leisure, the existence of your nations , your children have been paid by Soviet soldiers, their lives, their blood.
& copy 2025 The Canadian Press
