OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau gather Friday to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp in the final months of World War II, amid the horror of the war that again breaks the peace in Europe.
The former concentration and extermination camp is located in the southern Polish city of Oświęcim, which during World War II was under occupation by German forces and became a site of systematic murder of Jews, Poles, prisoners Soviet, Roma and other war fighters. for the elimination by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.
In all, around 1.1 million people died in the vast complex before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
Today the site, with its barracks and barbed wire and the ruins of the gas chambers, stands as one of the world’s most recognized symbols of evil and a “Never Again” warning that it has been a place of pilgrimage for millions.
Yet it is just 300 kilometers (185 miles) from Ukraine, where Russian aggression is creating unthinkable death and destruction, a conflict on the minds of many who are paying tribute to the victims of eight decades ago.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attended celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in 2005. But he has not been welcome for years.
This year, no Russian officials were invited due to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
Bogdan Bartnikowski, a Pole who was 12 when he was transported to Auschwitz, said the first images he saw on television last February of refugees fleeing after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered traumatic memories.
He was stunned to see a little girl in a large crowd of refugees holding her mother with one hand and clutching a teddy bear with the other.
“It was literally a blow to the head for me because I suddenly saw, after almost 80 years, what I had seen in a freight car when I was being transported to Auschwitz. A little girl was sitting next to me, hugging a doll to her chest,” said Bartnikowski, now 91.
Bartnikowski was among several Auschwitz survivors who spoke about their experiences to reporters on the eve of Friday’s commemorations.
One of the others, Stefania Wernik, who was born in Auschwitz in November 1944, less than three months before her release, spoke of Auschwitz as “hell on earth.”
She said that when she was born she was so small that the Nazis tattooed her number, 89136, on her thigh. They washed her in cold water, wrapped her in rags, and subjected her to medical experiments.
And yet his mother had plenty of milk, and they both survived. After the war, her mother returned home and was reunited with her husband, and “the whole town came to look at us and said it’s a miracle.”
He read an appeal to the next generations to be vigilant against insidious ideologies.
“No more fascism, which brings death, genocide, crimes, massacres and loss of human dignity,” he said.
Among those expected to attend Friday’s commemorations is Doug Emhoff, husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Germans established Auschwitz in 1940 for Polish prisoners; they later expanded the complex, building death chambers and crematoriums where Jews from all over Europe were brought by train to be murdered.
In other parts of the world, events were planned on Friday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual commemoration established by a United Nations resolution in 2005.
About 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust and millions more were killed in the world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945.
