The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops will be identified on Monday at the location of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely treated as the last major compliance in which a remarkable number of survivors can take part.
Among Those who have traveled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who six when she she was Among the 7.000 People Liberated on Jan. 27, 1945. She Believes it will be the last gathering of survivors at Auschwitz From her home in New Jersey to give her voice with increasing hatred and anti -Semitism.
“The world has become poisonous,” she told the Associated Press the day before the observations in nearby Krakow. “It is clear to me that we are again in a crisis that there is so much hatred, so much distrust that if we don’t stop, there can be getting worse. There can be another terrible destruction.”
The German National Socialist armed forces murdered around 1.1 million people on the site in the southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the Second World War. Most victims were Jews who were killed in the industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poland, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who aim to eliminate the racial ideology of the National Socialist breed.
Older warehouse survivors, some of whom wore striped scarves that are reminiscent of their prison uniforms, went together to the death wall, where prisoners were executed, including many poles that opposed the occupation of their country.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with two Canadian Holocaust survivors in Krakow, Poland, as part of events on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They were accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens during the war. He wore a candle and went with Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Director Piotr Cywinski. On the wall, the two men used their heads, murmured prayers and crossed themselves.
“We Poland, on the country – which were occupied by the Nazis at the time – the German buildings this extermination industry and this concentration camp today the guards of memory,” said Duda afterwards.
He spoke of the “unimaginable damage” that so many people, especially the Jewish people, was inflicted.
“Our duty … to remember”
In total, the Germans murdered six million Jews from all over Europe and destroyed two thirds of the European Jews and a third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations called January 27 for the International Holocaust Day.
Throughout Europe, officials and others took a break to remember.
“While the last survivors fade, it is our duty as a European to remember the unspeakable crimes and honor the memories of the victims,” said the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, on X.
The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who heads a nation against the brutal invasion of Russia, put a candle in the Babyn Yar Holocaust monument the day before in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the crew. On Monday he arrived in Poland to take part in the commemoration.
“Evil that tries to destroy the life of the whole nations still remains in the world,” he wrote on his telegram page.
Memorial ceremonies will later culminate on Monday when the leaders and kings of the world join the older camp survivors, of whom the youngest took place in Birkenau in the 80s, the part of Auschwitz in which the mass murder of Jews took place.
However, politicians were not asked this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom are expected, the organizers decide to make them the center of the observations. Ronald Lauder, the President of the global Jewish congress, will also speak.
Participate in the world leader, including Trudeau
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be present.
Before the ceremony, Trudeau met with Canadian Auschwitz survivors who also made their trip to Poland. This could be Trudeaus’s last big international journey as Prime Minister before the next liberal party leader is selected on March 9th.
In an explanation published on X Sunday, Trudeau wrote: “80 years ago, Auschwitz Birkenau concentration and the extinction camp was freed, which ended the systematic murder and the genocide there.”
“Tomorrow I will stand with other world leaders on the site of Auschwitz Birkenau the victims of the Holocaust, against rising anti -Semitism and Holocaust refusal and reject our promise: never again.”
Among other leaders who are expected, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier are present. According to the German news agency dpa, Germany has never sent the highest state representatives to the observations.
It is a sign of the continuing commitment of Germany to take responsibility for the country’s crimes, even if a right -wing extremist party has been strengthened in recent years.
French President Emmanuel Macron will be present after observing a moment of silence in the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic grave for the six million Jews who have no grave, and with a survivor from Auschwitz and one from the mountains -Belsen to meet camp.
British King Charles III. Will also be there with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway.
Russian representatives were in the past central guests for the anniversary observations in recognizing the Soviet liberation of the camp on January 27, 1945 and the enormous losses that were suffered by the Soviet armed forces in the defeat of the Allied Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome in Russia since Ukraine’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin sent the participants a message that said: “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who won this terrible, total evil and won the size of its size will always stay in world history. ”
“Russian citizens are direct descendants and successors of the generation of the winners,” said Putin. “We will continue to counteract the attempts to rewrite the legal and moral judgment of the Nazis Metzger and their downs in principle and firmly.”
Holocaust educators say with more misinformation about the spread of the Holocaust on social media. Your work is more important than ever to ensure that younger generations know what really happened.
