Auschwitz survivors were joined by world leaders last night to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp by Soviet troops, one of the last such gatherings of those who experienced its horrors.
The anniversary at the site of the camp, which Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland during the Second World War to murder European Jews, was being attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Britain’s King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, Polish President Andrzej Duda and many other leaders.
They were not due to make speeches, but rather to listen for perhaps the last time to those who suffered and witnessed at first hand one of humanity’s greatest atrocities.
Israel, founded for Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust, sent Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
“The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task, and in so doing we inform our present and shape our future,” Charles said during a visit to the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow.
President Duda told reporters at the camp that “we Poles, on whose land the Germans built this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory”. Remembrance of crimes committed in the name of Nazi notions of racial superiority has become an acutely political issue in recent years with the rise of far-right parties across Europe.
On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk, high-profile adviser to US President Donald Trump, made a video address to supporters of Germany’s AfD (Alternative fuer Deutschland), which is running second in polls for the February 23 election on a platform that includes playing down historical guilt for the Holocaust.
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” said Musk, who himself laid a wreath at Auschwitz a year ago. The rally prompted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to say that “the words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about ‘Great Germany’ and ‘the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous”.
Pawel Sawicki, spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, said politicians would not make speeches at the ceremony.
The main commemoration was due to begin in a tent built over the gate to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
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