Observances held at Auschwitz memorial on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago, and this milestone is being honored with a ceremony at the former death camp. It is considered one of the final significant gatherings that a substantial number of survivors will be able to participate in. Among the attendees is Tova Friedman, now 86 years old, who was just 6 when she was freed from Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. She traveled from New Jersey to join the event and raise awareness about the increasing levels of hatred and antisemitism in today’s world.

Tova Friedman, who experienced the horrors of Auschwitz as a young girl, acknowledges that this commemoration may be the final opportunity for survivors to gather at the site. She emphasizes the importance of speaking out against hatred and discrimination. Despite the passage of 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the message of remembrance and vigilance against antisemitism remains as crucial as ever.

“The world has become toxic,” she told The Associated Press a day before the observances in nearby Krakow. “I realize that we’re in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”

Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology.

Elderly camp survivors, some wearing blue-and-white striped scarves that recall their prison uniforms, walked together to the Death Wall, where prisoners were executed, including Poles who resisted the occupation of their country.

They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost 6 million citizens during the war. He carried a candle and walked with Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum director Piotr Cywinski. At the wall, the two men bowed their heads, murmured prayers and crossed themselves.

“We Poles, on whose land – occupied by Nazi Germans at that time – the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory,” Duda told reporters afterward.

He spoke of the “unimaginable harm” inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people.

In all, the Nazis regime murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Across Europe, officials and others were pausing to remember.

“As the last survivors fade, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and to honor the memories of the victims,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, said on X.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia’s brutal invasion, placed a candle at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial a day before in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation. On Monday he arrived in Poland to attend the commemorations.

“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” he wrote on his Telegram page.

Commemorations will culminate when world leaders and royalty will join with elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s, at Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the mass murder of Jews took place.

Politicians, however, have not been asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom are expected, organizers are choosing to make them the center of the observances. Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak.

Among the leaders expected to attend are Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never sent both of its highest state representatives to the observances before, according to German news agency dpa.

It is a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation’s crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years.

French President Emmanuel Macron will attend after paying his respects at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic tomb for the 6 million Jews who don’t have a grave, and meeting with a survivor from Auschwitz and one from the Bergen-Belsen camp.

Britain’s King Charles III will also be there, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway.

Russian representatives were in the past central guests at the anniversary observances in recognition of the Red Army liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, and the huge losses of Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to participants saying: “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this dreadful, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a briefing Thursday: “There is something that needs to be said to the organizers and all the Europeans who will be there: your lives, your work and leisure, the very existence of your nations, your children have been paid for by Soviet soldiers, their lives, their blood.”