SURVIVORS of Nazi death camps marked 79 years since the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau at a modest ceremony in southern Poland on Saturday.
About 20 survivors of various camps set up by Nazi Germany across Europe laid wreaths and flowers and lit candles at Auschwitz’s Death Wall, where thousands of inmates, mostly Polish resistance members and others, were executed.
Later the group, along with state officials and other participants, gathered for a ceremony by a brick women’s barrack at nearby Birkenau that has recently undergone conservation.
The group prayed and lit candles at the monument in Birkenau, near the crematoria ruins, to remember around 1.1 million camp victims, mostly Jews.
Events were also held in many other countries to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the Nazis’ killing nearly six million European Jews and countless others.
The survivors were accompanied by Polish Senate Speaker Malgorzata Kidawa-Blonska, Culture Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz and Israeli ambassador to Poland Yacov Livne.
Ninety-four-year-old survivor Halina Birenbaum spoke beside barrack 27, where she spent part of August 1943 until inmates were forced to evacuate the camp on foot on January 18 1945.
She said the suffering and tragedy of people in contemporary wars and from the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was “painful” for her and an extension of her Auschwitz experience.
Mr Livne used the occasion to defend Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
“We hoped that the lessons of the Holocaust have been learnt,” he said. “Yet, today we are astonished by accusations of genocide against the Jewish state while we fight for our existence.”
In Germany, where people laid flowers and lit candles at memorials for the victims of the Nazis, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his country would continue to bear responsibility for this “crime against humanity.”
He added: “Never again” is every day.
“January 27 calls out to us: Stay visible! Stay audible! Against anti-semitism, against racism, against misanthropy — and for our democracy.”
In Italy, Premier Giorgia Meloni claimed that her far-right government was committed to eradicating anti-semitism.
Ms Meloni's critics have long accused her and her Brothers of Italy party, which has neofascist roots, of failing to atone sufficiently for its past.
Since 1979, Auschwitz-Birkenau has been on the Unesco list of world heritage sites.
