World leaders mark Auschwitz liberation
Leaders from 30 countries gathered today to remember the victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops.
Major Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the unit that captured the camp on January 27, 1945, greeted leaders and survivors at a morning Holocaust forum in the Polish city of Krakow ahead of the main ceremony at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.
“I would like to say to all the people on the earth, unite and do not permit this evil that was committed,” the elderly Shapiro said in a recorded video greeting played in Krakow’s Slovacki theatre. “This should never be repeated, ever."
The forum began with applause for Shapiro, who lives in the United States, and three other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate Auschwitz. Their chests decorated with medals, they stood in a theatre box to take applause and appeared on stage to receive medals from Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kwasniewski and Israeli President Moshe Katsav were to join survivors later at the infamous rail siding at the nearby Birkenau camp, where Nazi doctors carried out the “selection” of new arrivals. That meant choosing those deemed able to be worked to death from the majority who were immediately to the gas chambers.
Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews from across Europe, died in gas chambers or from disease, starvation, abuse and exhaustion at Auschwitz and Birkenau – the most notorious of the death camps set up by Adolf Hitler to carry out his “final solution”, the murder of Europe’s Jewish population.
Soviet troops reached the camp on January 27, 1945, finding 7,000 survivors, many barely alive. The retreating Nazis had driven most of the prisoners who still had strength to walk out into the snow, on a “death march” toward camps further west.
Six million Jews died in the Nazi camps, along with several million others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
Vice President Dick Cheney is representing the United States. Germany’s President Horst Koehler was to attend, but was not scheduled to speak – an acknowledgement of Germany’s role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust. He was to address a youth forum called Let My People Live beforehand.
Newly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was also to address the youth gathering, and members of the audience stood and applauded as he entered the hall.
Survivors who returned for the commemoration stressed that each new generation needs to be educated about the Holocaust.
“It’s very important, you are the last generation that can talk to the survivors, we are every day less,” Trudy Spira, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with her family as an 11-year-old from Slovakia, told reporters in Krakow.
“We can give living testimony … to let the world know, to try to get them to learn even though they don’t, so that it doesn’t happen again.”
Reports in western Europe of increasing anti-Jewish incidents such as vandalising graves, and a walkout last week by members of a small German far-right party from an Auschwitz commemoration in the Saxony state parliament were cited as examples of why it is important to go on teaching about the Holocaust.
Russian Jews expressed hope that Putin, too, would address the issue of anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, a group of nationalist Russian MPs called for an investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organisations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.
The Foreign Ministry and the prosecutor general have condemned the letter but the Kremlin has yet to react. Isaak Sloutzker, a 77-year-old Russian Jew who travelled to Poland from Veliky Novgorod to attend the commemorations, said: “I’d like to hear a condemnation of xenophobia by the Russian president.”
“Today there are 70,000 skinheads in Russia, I’d like him to talk about that, and law enforcement organs don’t allow proper investigations into cases of incitement of racial hatred, and today people with a different skin colour or nationality are killed and today there are parties the State Duma who say “Russia is for the Russians” and “We are for Russians, we are for the poor,” said Alla Gerber, head of Russia’s Holocaust Foundation.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav reminded the Krakow gathering that the camp was now part of the European Union, which Poland joined in May.
“The Holocaust must be placed in the central place of collective memory of the reunited Europe,” he said.
Ukraine’s newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko, greeted with a standing ovation when he entered the hall, said he brought his children to the occasion and spoke of his father, a wounded Soviet prisoner of war who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz.
“This is a sacred place for me and my family. This is a place where Andrei Yushchenko, my father, suffered. There will never be a Jewish question in my country, I vow that,” he said.
