Auschwitz survivors return on 80th anniversary of death camp’s liberation

Dozens of Auschwitz survivors returned to the Nazi death camp on Monday, joining world leaders to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation in what could be the last major gathering of former prisoners at the site.

Nazi German forces murdered an estimated 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the Second World War.

Most of the victims were Jews, killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others who were targeted for elimination by the racial ideology.

Britain's King Charles III was among the dignitaries to attend the anniversary event, alongside members of the royal families of Spain, Denmark and Norway.

"The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task, and in so doing we inform our present and shape our future," King Charles said on a visit to the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, about 70km from the death camp.

World leaders and politicians also attended, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Israel sent its Education Minister Yoav Kisch.

Politicians, however, were not asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom were expected, organisers chose to have them at the centre of the observances.

Four survivors were scheduled to speak. Journalist and historian Marian Turski, 98, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 and survived the "death march" westward to Buchenwald in 1945.

He called on those gathered to turn their thoughts to victims of the Holocaust, recalling that the number of those killed was always far greater than the number who survived. “We have always been a tiny minority,” Mr Turski said. “And now only a handful remain.”

Author and academic Tova Friedman, 86, whose book The Daughter of Auschwitz describes her experiences, was five when she was taken to the camp with her mother.

80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - in pictures

Speaking at the event, she described her journey to the concentration camp: "Hungry, thirsty and very terrified, I held on tightly to my mother's hand in the dark cattle car for countless hours while the cries and the prayers of so many desperate women permeated my soul and haunt me to this day.

"Finally, we arrived at Auschwitz, a gloomy Sunday with a sky obscured by smoke and a terrible stink hung in the air, and there were rows and rows of naked women all around me."

During her time in the camp, she thought it was normal to die if you were a Jewish child. "We all, all of us, must reawaken our collective conscious to transform this violence, anger, hatred and malignancy, that has so powerfully gripped our society, into a humane and just world. Before this terrible, terrible negative forces will destroy us all."

Former physician Leon Weintraub, 99, lived in the Lodz ghetto in Poland and was separated from his family and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Addressing the event, he condemned rising hatred in the world, which he blames on “increasingly vocal movements of the radical and anti-democratic right".

He said he sees the same in Sweden, where he settled after fleeing postwar anti-Semitism in Poland.

Retired pharmacist Janina Iwanska, a Polish Catholic, was taken to Auschwitz in a freight train in 1944, after being expelled from her home during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.

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

Ms Friedman was six when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on January 27, 1945. She believes Monday's event will be the last gathering of survivors at Auschwitz and she travelled from her home in the US state of New Jersey to add her voice to those warning about rising hatred.

“The world has become toxic,” she said, a day before the observances in nearby Krakow. “I realise 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."

The 527 children saved from Auschwitz - in pictures

They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six 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,” Mr Duda said afterwards.

He spoke of the “unimaginable harm” inflicted on so many, especially the Jewish people. “May the memory of all the dead live on, may they rest in peace,” he said.

After a prayer by a group of clerics representing Judaism, the Catholic and Protestant churches, Greek Orthodox and Islam, survivors, accompanied by family members, were invited to leave symbolic candles in memory of those who died at Auschwitz. The elderly men and women placed the lights on a table and they were followed by heads of state and government.

In all, the Nazis killed six million Jews from all over Europe, two thirds of the continent's Jewish population and one third of those worldwide at the time. In 2005, the UN designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz - in pictures

Across Europe on Monday, officials and the public paused to remember. “As the last survivors fade, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and to honour the memories of the victims,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on X on Monday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy placed a candle at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation.

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

There were no Russian representatives, despite them being central guests at similar anniversary observances in recognition of the Soviet liberation of the camp and the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces in the allied defeat of Nazi Germany.