The focus of the world will be on the rest those who survived of Nazi Germany's atrocities on Monday as world leaders and royals join them in celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation Auschwitz.
The main celebrations take place in site in southern Poland, where Nazi Germany killed more than a million people, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, gays and other targets liquidation in Adolf Hitler's racial ideology.
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The anniversary takes on added poignancy because of the advanced age of the survivors and the knowledge that they will soon be gone, even as new wars make their warnings more relevant than ever.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum says it expects about 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other camps to attend Monday afternoon's events, joined by political leaders and members of the royal family.
On this occasion, the authorities will sit down and listen to the voices of former prisoners, while there is still time to hear them.
Auschwitz labor and death camp
German authorities established the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940 in the Polish city of Auschwitz after the 1939 invasion of Poland. It used to be a camp for Polish prisoners, including Catholic priests and members of the Polish underground resistance. The Germans later set up around 40 camps in the area, but the most infamous is Birkenau, a huge site used for mass killings in gas chambers.
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Those who arrived in Birkenau were brought in cramped carriages without windows. On the infamous ramp, fascists selected those who could be used as forced labor. The rest—old men, women, children, and infants—were gassed to death immediately upon arrival.
In total, the Germans killed 6 million Jews, or two-thirds of all Jews in Europe, during the Holocaust at Auschwitz and other camps, in ghettos, and in mass executions close to people's homes.
Liberated by the Red Army
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops arrived at the gates of Auschwitz and found about 7,000 weak and emaciated prisoners.
Boris Polyavoi, a correspondent of the Soviet newspaper “Pravda”, who was the first eyewitness, described the scene of unimaginable suffering: “I saw thousands of tortured people who were saved by the Red Army – people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people. whose age could not be guessed.'
At the time, Allied forces were moving across Europe in a series of offensive operations against Germany. In July 1944 Soviet troops first liberated the Majdanek camp near Lublin, and then liberated Auschwitz, Stutthof and others.
American and British troops meanwhile liberated camps in the west, including Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen.
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After the day of liberation, some prisoners died of diseases. Many faced the grief of murdered parents and children, spouses, brothers and sisters. Entire families were exterminated.
“For Jewish survivors, liberation day is a very, very sad day,” said Havi Dreyfuss, a Holocaust historian at Tel Aviv University, in a recent online discussion about the anniversary.
Auschwitz Memorial Complex
Today, the site is a museum and memorial run by the Polish state, and is one of the most visited sites in Poland. Its mission is to preserve the objects that are there and the memory of what happened there; it organizes tours and its historians conduct research. In 2024, more than 1.83 million people visited the site.
The challenges facing the museum are enormous and include efforts to preserve the barracks and other objects that were not intended to be preserved for long. One of the particularly emotional projects is the preservation of shoes of murdered children.
Auschwitz as a symbol of all Nazi terror
Auschwitz is not only a place where 1.1 million people were exterminated, 90% of them Jews. He is also embedded in the collective memory of the world as the embodiment of all the crimes of the Nazis and an example of what hatred, racism and anti-Semitism can lead to.
One of the reasons Auschwitz has become a major symbol of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes is that it was also a labor camp and had thousands of eyewitness survivors who could tell the world what happened there.
“Relatively many people survived, which, for example, rarely happened in places where there was no such component of forced labor,” said Thomas Van de Putte, a scholar specializing in cultural and collective memory of the Holocaust at King's College London.
Up to 900,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed in Treblinka in 1942-43, and mass killings also took place in Belzec and other camps, but the Germans tried to cover up the evidence of their crimes, and there were almost no survivors.
In Auschwitz, the Germans left behind barracks and watchtowers, the remains of gas chambers, as well as the hair and personal belongings of the people killed there. The gate “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work will set you free) is recognized worldwide.
What remained of the Birkens also left a mark on the collective conscience. As Van der Pute points out: “You have a gate, you have a carriage. You have an incredibly long railway platform that leads to the former crematoriums and gas chambers.”
Who is going?
Presidents, royalty, ambassadors, rabbis and priests will join those who survived in a heated tent set up in Birkenau on Monday afternoon.
Germany, a country that has for decades expressed remorse for the crimes committed by Hitler, will be represented by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Also in attendance will be the president of Austria, which was annexed by Germany in 1938, and Italy, whose dictator Benito Mussolini allied with Hitler.
Among others present are Polish President Andrzej Duda, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the President of France. Emmanuel Macron.
Britain's King Charles III, who has long worked to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, will also attend, along with other European royals, including Spain's King Felipe VI.
Who will not be there
Russian President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honor at the 60th anniversary in 2005, a testament to the USSR's role in liberating Auschwitz and the high price Soviet troops paid for their victory over Germany.
But because of Russian aggression in Ukraine, he is no longer expected. This will be the third year in a row — since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — without a Russian representative.
“This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the sacrifices, but we also celebrate freedom. It is difficult to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom,” said the director of the museum Piotr Tsyvinsky.
The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza also caused a stir over whether or not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should attend. The International Criminal Court, the world's premier war crimes court, an arrest warrant was issued Netanyahu in November accused him of crimes against humanity for Israel's actions in Gaza. This meant that Poland, as a signatory, would have to arrest him.
Finally, the Polish government adopted a resolution promising to ensure the safe participation of Israel's top representatives. Israel, however, is sticking with plans to send its education minister, Yoav Kish.