World remembers the horrors of Auschwitz
World leaders and death camp survivors mourned victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, gathering today at the spot where Nazi doctors once sent new arrivals to the gas chambers.
Candles flickered in the Polish winter gloom atop the rail track leading into the vast, snow-covered camp at Birkenau, and the ceremony began with the ominous rumble of an arriving train.
Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Birkenau – Brzezinka in Polish – and at nearby Auschwitz. Others who died at Auschwitz included Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazi regime.
“It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people,” Israeli President Moshe Katsav said. “When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims.”
Joining the commemoration were presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and France’s Jacques Chirac. German President Horst Koehler sat on the platform without speaking in recognition of Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust.
Ageing Holocaust survivors, some wearing tags displaying their prison number, huddled under blankets at the outdoor ceremony.
Soviet troops liberated the camps on January 27, 1945. In all, some six million Jews died in the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s attempt to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population. Several million others died as well.
The ceremony was held at the spot where camp officials carried out “selection,” choosing a few people to be worked to death and sending most immediately to the gas chambers.
Barbed wire and brick barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. A few yards away stood the ruined crematoriums where the dead were burned.
“For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland’s foreign minister.
When he arrived in 1940, he recalled, “I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II.”
World leaders placed candles at the memorial on the spot as they left.
“We think of the suffering of our brothers,” said Kwasniewski, “of the special ties that link us Poles with the Jewish nation.”
Russia’s Putin compared Nazis to today’s terrorists.
“Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world. Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism,” he said.
US Vice President Dick Cheney said earlier at a youth forum in Krakow that the camps remind the world evil must be confronted.
“We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror,” he said.
Participants at the Krakow forum applauded several surviving Soviet soldiers awarded for liberating the camp, and saw a video message from 92-year-old Major Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the Soviet unit that captured Auschwitz.
He was too sick to travel from his home in New York.
“I would like to say to all the people on the earth: Unite, and do not permit this evil that was committed,” Shapiro said in the recorded greeting. “This should never be repeated, ever.”
Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak, 80, said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened.
“Today I’m remembering my father, gassed here. I’m remembering the atrocious things they did to us here,” said Jozefiak, who is from Krakow. “I drank water from a dirty pool and, to punish me, an SS man jumped on my arm and broke it and jumped on my chest and broke two ribs.”
One day, he said, the Nazi guards lined them up and told some to go right, others left. He went left and his father went right and was taken to the gas chamber.
“The message today is: No more Auschwitz,” Jozefiak said. “But the world has learned nothing so far – you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere in the world.
“Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget,” he said.
Ukraine’s newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko took his young children to the concentration camp 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.
