“Nothing will be easy about returning to Auschwitz, 80 years after I was liberated. This commemoration will be the last of its kind. We will be there. Will you stand with us?” – Michael Bornstein, Auschwitz Survivor.
Dozens of world leaders, including King Charles III, joined a dwindling group of Nazi death camp survivors on Monday in southern Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered, along with Poles, the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities.
A day of solemn ceremony, shadowed by a resurgence of nationalism in Germany and several other European countries, began early Monday near a former gas chamber and crematory in the Polish town of Oswiecim, whose name was Germanised to Auschwitz during Hitler’s 1939-1945 occupation of Poland.
The commemoration got underway with survivors of Auschwitz — who numbered thousands at the end of World War II in 1945 but have mostly since died — hobbling into a courtyard between two red-brick former barracks to place lit candles on the Wall of Death.
The wall, flanked on one side by a building in which SS physicians conducted grotesque and often fatal experiments on female inmates, is where prisoners and Polish resistance fighters were executed by the Nazis. It remains pockmarked with bullet holes.
On the other side of the courtyard where the opening ceremony took place is the building where, in September 1941, the SS first tested the use of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany and later used for mass murder in gas chambers.
Aging survivors, many of them infirm and walking with canes or held up by young relatives, paused briefly and silently at the wall after placing their candles. They were followed by President Andrzej Duda of Poland and Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Both crossed themselves next to a row of wreathes with red and white roses.
