‘THE TRUTH MUST NOT DIE’
Auschwitz memorial – 200 survivors of Nazi atrocities gather at death camp on 75th anniversary of its liberation
AUSCHWITZ survivors prayed and wept when they returned to the Nazi death camp where they lost entire families to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation.
About 200 joined world leaders in Poland after travelling from Israel, the US, Australia, Peru, Russia, Slovenia and elsewhere.
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Many lost parents and grandparents during the Holocaust but were today joined by their own children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.
"We have with us the last living survivors, the last among those who saw the Holocaust with their own eyes," said Polish President Andrzej Duda.
He went on to say that distorting the history of the second world war and denying the crimes of genocide was tantamount to desecration of the memory of the victims.
Duda then movingly added the “truth about the Holocaust must not die.”
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Among those in attendance were the Duchess of Cornwall, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Israeli president Reuven Rivlin.
They gathered in a heated tent straddling the train tracks that transported Jews to the gas chambers before their remains were then cremated.
Auschwitz - the largest Nazi death camp - was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on on January 27, 1945.
Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, brought the crowd to tears with the story of a survivor who was separated from his family.
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He told how the man watched watched his young daughter, in a red coat, walk to her death, turning into a small red dot in the distance before disappearing forever.
"Do not ever let this happen again to any people", Lauder said, warning about the rising anti-Semitism.
"After the end of the war, when the world finally saw pictures of gas chambers, nobody in their right mind wanted to be associated with the Nazis," he recalled.
"But now I see something I never thought I would see in my lifetime, the open and brazen spread of anti-Jewish hatred."
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People stood in silence as a Jewish survivor recited Hebrew prayers for the dead, bowing their heads or wiping away tears.
Then, with the famous gate and barbed wire illuminated in the dark and cold evening, guests marched in a procession to place candles at a memorial to the victims set amid the remains of the gas chambers.
Most of the 1.1 million people murdered by the Nazis at the camp were Jews, but other Poles, Russians and Roma were imprisoned and killed there.
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I was sent to Auschwitz at 12 where my mother and seven siblings were gassed
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