On a day of startling blue skies, Auschwitz survivors stood before princes and presidents on Monday to remind the world, perhaps for the final time, of the horrors they suffered there during one of the darkest moments of human history.
Beneath a white marquee erected in front of the gate to the former Nazi death camp, four former inmates – the youngest 86, the oldest 99 – warned world leaders on the 80th anniversary of its liberation against the danger of rising antisemitism.
Tova Friedman, 86, was five when she came to the camp, but said her memories were still “so vivid”. She recalled “the cries of desperate women”, the “terrible stink” of the chimneys, six- and seven-year-olds led shoeless through the snow to gas chambers.
“We are here to proclaim … that we can never, ever allow history to repeat itself,” she said. But eight decades after the camp’s liberation, she said, “our Jewish-Christian values are once more overshadowed by prejudice, fear, suspicion, extremism”.
With nationalist and far-right parties gaining support across Europe and disinformation increasingly distorting the history of the Holocaust, this year’s anniversary carried special weight. Memories of one of humanity’s worst atrocities are fading.
In front of one of the freight wagons that carried people here like cattle, Marian Turski, 98, condemned a “huge rise” in antisemitism and called for “courage” against Holocaust minimisers and conspiracy theorists.
Leon Weintraub, 99, who managed to sneak out of Auschwitz by joining a group of prisoners working outside the camp, urged vigilance against a resurgent European far right with its ideology of “hostility and resentment” against all who are different.
“Let’s take seriously what the enemies of democracy preach,” he said. “We, survivors, understand that the consequence of ‘being different’ is active persecution, which we have personally experienced,” he said. “We must avoid the mistakes of the 1930s.”
Janina Iwańska, 94, a Polish Catholic and inmate number 85595 at Auschwitz, said nobody knew exactly how many people died there. By liberation day only the sick, the young and pregnant women were left, she said. “It was a killing factory.”
Speaking after the survivors, the World Jewish Congress president, Ronald Lauder, said the horrors of Auschwitz and Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel were both inspired by “the age-old hatred of Jews”.
Antisemitism “had its willing supporters then, and it has them now,” he said. When Auschwitz was liberated, the world saw where “the step-by-step progress of antisemitism leads. It leads right here … Things are not OK.”
Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi death camps and has become a symbol of the genocide of 6 million European Jews. An estimated 1 million died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jewish people.
“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides, memory warns,” said the Auschwitz museum director, Piotr Cywinski. Turning to the survivors, he said their experiences “shape our memory … And what do we do with that memory today?”
After Jewish prayers, accompanied by music written by composers who had themselves been Auschwitz inmates, 56 survivors helped by relatives and young assistants laid votive candles, followed by the heads of 54 national delegations.
Among them were presidents Emmanuel Macron of France, Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Sergio Mattarella of Italy and Alexander van der Bellen of Austria; they were joined by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and prime ministers from Canada, Croatia and Ireland.
The members of royalty in attendance included King Charles of Britain, Felipe of Spain, Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, Philippe of Belgium, Frederik of Denmark and Haakon of Norway, as well as Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden.
Other countries, including Israel and the US, sent ministers or ambassadors. Russia was not invited (although in Moscow, Vladimir Putin hailed the Red Army soldiers who liberated Auschwitz for having ended the “terrible, total evil” of the camp).
None were called on to speak. Paweł Sawicki, a museum spokesperson, said: “Twenty years ago, we had more than 1,000 survivors here; 10 years ago it was 300. Five years ago, we had 100, and today – not many more than 50. In 10 years’ time, how many will there be? That’s why it’s so incredibly important that we focus just on these survivors.”
Earlier in the day, elderly former inmates, some wearing blue-and-white striped scarves recalling their prison uniforms, laid wreaths and lit candles at Auschwitz’s Death Wall, where thousands of camp inmates were executed by firing squad.
Since the occupying Nazi Germans had “built this extermination industry and this concentration camp” on their country’s land, said Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, “we Poles are today the guardians of memory”.
Sawicki said this year’s anniversary was particularly significant not just because of the survivors’ advancing age but because of growing distortion of the history of the Holocaust, fuelled particularly by disinformation on social media.
“For people born 30 or 40 years ago, they learned this history at the family table, from their grandparents,” he said. “But for today’s generations, the Holocaust textbook history, and textbook history, is a much more fragile history, much easier to distort.”
A recent poll found that proportions of young European adults sometimes running into high double digits had not heard of the Holocaust, could not name Auschwitz or any other camp and had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion, mainly online.
Considerable numbers thought the number of Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust had been exaggerated, with many – including 24% in Poland, 21% in France, 20% in the UK and 18% in Germany – believing 2 million or fewer people died.
The continent’s increasingly polarised politics, and the success of nativist parties, have also turned the remembrance of Nazi crimes into an intensely political issue.
The US tech mogul Elon Musk this weekend told a rally of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party that it was time for Germany to move on, saying children “should not be guilty of the sins of their parents – let alone their great grandparents”.
Those who died at Auschwitz were either murdered in gas chambers or perished from starvation, cold and disease. Mostly Jews, they also included Polish resistance fighters, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners, sexual minorities and disabled people.
Nazi Germany established the camp in 1940 within former barracks in the southern Polish town of Oświęcim, later establishing about 40 other camps in the area, including Birkenau, which was used for mass killings in gas chambers.
On 17 January 1945, as Soviet troops advanced into formerly Nazi-held territory, the paramilitary SS forced 60,000 emaciated prisoners to walk westward in what became known as the Death March, and over the following days the gas chambers and crematoriums were blown up.
On 27 January, Soviet troops arrived, finding 7,000 emaciated survivors. The UN has designated the day Auschwitz was liberated as Holocaust Memorial Day and the site is now a Polish state museum and memorial visited by nearly 2 million people a year.
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