Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Memorial Day, or Holocaust-Gedenktag, as it is referred to in German. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, is associated with the pledge “Nie wieder,” or “Never again.”
A special commemoration will be held at the Museum and Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the location of the former German National Socialist regime’s concentration and extermination camp.
The main commemoration will begin at 4.00 pm in a special tent that was built over the gate to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
The program will include a tribute to the camp’s victims as well as a commemoration of the liberation of the camp 80 years ago, which will be broadcast by Polish Television and on the web.
An ever-dwindling number of elderly survivors will return to the camp to recall the day it was finally liberated on January 27, 1945 by Soviet troops.
They will be joined by heads of state including King Charles and other European royalty, Emmanuel Macron of France, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
The striped prisoner uniform at Auschwitz was marked with a badge indicating the prisoner’s category and a label carrying an identification number that henceforth substituted his or her name.
During the commemoration at the camp, it will be the voices of the survivors – most now in the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s – not foreign dignataries, whose voices will be heard at the place where 1.1 million people were murdered, most of them Jews.
Their message is to tell the world what happened here and ensure that it never happens again.
The National Socialist regime’s decision to wipe out European Jewry in extermination camps went into operation early in 1942. Six were built in occupied Poland: at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Treblinka was far smaller than Auschwitz, and yet 800,000-850,000 Jews were murdered there in a far shorter period.
Heinrich Himmler, supreme chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, a paramilitary operation under Reichsfúhrer Adolf Hitler, and camp commandant Rudolf Höss oversaw the expansion of the Auschwitz complex to construct a second camp at Birkenau for industrial murder. The result: By the end of 1942 there were four separate gas chambers and crematoria.
“Nothing will be easy about returning to Auschwitz, 80 years after I was liberated,” said Michael Bornstein, a survivor. “This commemoration will be the last of its kind. We will be there. Will you stand with us?”
Approximately one million European Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in the period 1941 to 1945, but the dead also include some 70,000 Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, as well as an unknown number of gay men.
(Photos: Accura Media Group)
