Auschwitz survivors return as world remembers Nazi death camp 80 years on

About 50 survivors of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau will return to the site on Monday to commemorate the day they were finally liberated on January 27, 1945.

Heads of state, including King Charles and other European monarchs, included France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

But it will be the survivors – most in their late 80s and 90s – whose voices will be heard during the commemoration at the camp where 1.1 million people were killed.

Their message is to tell the world what happened here and prevent it from happening again.

“Every soul on this earth has the right to live,” said Joanna Lax, now 94, who came with her twin and older sisters in 1944. Auschwitz was a laboratory for killing people. This was his duty and he proved himself. Few survived Auschwitz.

Although daytime temperatures have risen above freezing in recent days and much of the snow has melted, many of the 50 people who arrived at the memorial on Monday are now too weak to stay out in the open.

Instead, a large, warm tent was set up at the gate of death, as the entrance to the dead is known.

The day begins with survivors and Polish President Andrzej Duda laying wreaths at the “Death Wall” at the first Auschwitz camp, where thousands of Polish prisoners, Jews and Soviet prisoners of war were shot.

Later, the scene moves to the death camp at Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II.

Each major anniversary of the camp’s liberation by Soviet troops is different. Thirty years ago, the international interest was much less, as the famous writer Elie Weisel led many of the survivors and their relatives to one of the exploding corpses before the Nazis fled.

German historian Suzanne Willems spoke fondly of the survivors she met over the decades: “Many of them were like dear grandparents to me. Indeed, we have lost many of them and it is my duty to be their witness.

There will be no political talks from international leaders beside Death’s Gate, and there will be no Russian presence due to the large-scale war that broke out in Ukraine three years ago, although the camp was liberated by the Russian-dominated 60th Ukrainian Army. face to face.

Vladimir Putin attended the 60th anniversary; He won’t accept it now.

In early 1942, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe. 6 were built in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

Treblinka was much smaller than Auschwitz, but 800,000-850,00 Jews were killed in a short period of time.

Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, and camp commander Rudolf Höss oversaw the expansion of the Auschwitz complex to build a second camp for industrial extermination at Birkenau.

In the year By the end of 1942, there were four separate gas chambers and a crematoria.

The first mass deportations of Jews came from Slovakia and France in March 1942, then from the Netherlands and Belgium in July, and marched to their deaths.

Trains soon arrive at Birkenau on a specially constructed ramp, just a short distance from two gas chambers where at one point 12,000 Jews were gassed and burned each day.

Yona Lax lost her parents in Chelmo and arrived north from the Lodz Ghetto in 1944 with her twin sister Miriam and older sister Chana.

“I was ordered to go to the left, which meant the body, but my twin was sent to the right. That was because the man was so tired that he didn’t look, saying, ‘Left, right, left, right.’ I didn’t know that left meant death, but I knew it wasn’t good.” she told the BBC.

80 to 90 percent of the new arrivals were sent to their deaths, while the rest were selected for slave labor. “I was already very close to the door; I could see sparks, fire coming out of the chimney and I could even smell burnt flesh.”

Jonas Lax was saved only by her older sister screaming that she should not be separated from her twin, and word reached the camp with the Nazi pretender “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, the Birkenau unit, who had conducted often-fatal medical experiments on the twins. .

Women and children, the elderly and the infirm were immediately sent to the gas chambers. My own grandfather survived one month and one day of slave labor in the first Dutch transport until August 18, 1942.

His sister Gertje van Hasselt, her school headmaster husband Simon, and their two daughters, Hermi, 14, and nine-year-old Sophia, were killed on arrival on 12 February 1943.

From 1941 to 1945, approximately one million European Jews were killed. But among the dead were about 70,000 Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and an unknown number of gay men.

Auschwitz drew 1.83 million visitors last year, and despite being closed for the memorial, large numbers spent the weekend wandering around the museum in Auschwitz I, and then the desolate, sprawling site of Birkenau.

The size of the site is terrible. The remains of most of the blocks have been fenced off. But when the Nazis sought to destroy the evidence, the ruins of two gas chambers and a crematoria remained.

An 18-year-old from Lancashire, who was staying with a group of friends, said: “Being here makes you sad. You don’t know how sad you are until you see it.

“Of course you learn about it, but it’s crazy when you see it in real life,” said another. “It’s crazy to think that some people don’t think it exists.”

Far-right parties have made big gains in many European countries, even in Germany where Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is second in opinion polls ahead of next month’s election.

Historian Susan Willems, who has brought groups to Auschwitz for years, took a police team from Berlin to Auschwitz last week to explain the rise of Nazism and how any military-style hierarchy risks devolving into totalitarianism.

“I am doing this work to help these people have a clear understanding of what the limits of police action should be, and that it is their decision to obey or disobey whatever they are asked to do, and that they have the right to refuse anything that violates human rights based on their understanding;

Among those not in Poland for the commemoration is well-known Italian Auschwitz survivor Liliana Segre, 94, who will instead attend events in Rome.

Segre, a senator for life, will receive police protection amid a new wave of anti-Semitic attacks on social media following the release of a documentary on her life this month.

Her father and grandparents were all killed in Berkenau, but like Jonas Lax, she survived the Nazi death march to Malchow near the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a teenager.

“(Segre) often says to me, ‘I’m tired of insults,'” said Roberto Jarac, director of the Milan Holocaust Memorial.