Sprouting grass mixed with mud and remnants of snow on the unpaved sides of Auschwitz. The sun warms the body despite the cold. Eighty years ago, the extermination camp was surrounded by fog on this January 27th, and the weather made what the Red Army soldiers found upon liberating the place where 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jews, were murdered, more terrifying, a symbol of the Holocaust and where the Final Solution was materialized. Eight decades later, this Monday has been a day of mourning and remembrance at Auschwitz.
At nine in the morning, about fifty survivors with their families gathered at the death wall of the concentration camp. Clad in the blue and white striped scarf reminiscent of the uniform they wore in the camp, the victims of Nazism - all over 80 years old - placed candles and a floral offering at the death wall.
It is a concrete wall still bearing notches from bullets. A wall less than five meters long where prisoners were lined up to be executed with a gunshot. A method that proved ineffective for Hitler and his accomplices, as it was expensive and sometimes disturbed the executioners. This method of murder was replaced by killings with Zyklon B gas in Block 11 of the concentration camp.
The offering at the death wall is a tradition every five years, and the survivors are always accompanied by the President of Poland, who dedicates a few words to them. This Monday, Andrzej Duda recalled that it has been two decades since the United Nations established the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust. "As we well know, the concentration camps and, above all, the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Birkenau in particular, were built to carry out the extermination of the Jewish nation," he recalled in a speech in which he did not shy away from being harsh about what happened.
"This was Hitler's criminal plan, this was the criminal plan of the Nazi Germans during the Second World War to exterminate them." It is worth noting that during the Nazi occupation of Poland, citizens were divided between Jews and those belonging to the Aryan race, and in the plans to purify the race, Himmler ordered the kidnapping of the children of the 'purest' Poles to be educated in Germany in the National Socialist ideal. In the Holocaust, over 3 million Polish Jews were murdered, but also citizens of other nationalities. That is why delegations from around the world will be present at the commemorative events this Monday.
"We, the Poles, in whose lands then occupied by Nazi Germany the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory," Duda recalled just 24 hours after Elon Musk stated at a rally of the far-right AfD party that Germans "should not feel guilty for the Holocaust."
The Polish president has claimed his country's role in caring for the extermination camp "precisely so that memory does not perish, so that it does not fade away, so that people are always remembered and, thanks to this memory, the world never allows such a dramatic human catastrophe to happen again, or more precisely: the catastrophe of humanity. Because the fact that representatives of a nation can inflict such terrible and unimaginable harm on other nations, especially on the Jewish nation, is something that had never happened before in the history of humanity. And, among other things, this memory is kept so that it does not happen again."
As the morning progressed, security measures increased around Auschwitz. The reason was the international summit that would take place starting at two in the afternoon at the camp. Around noon, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, arrived in Krakow. He was one of the heads of state present at the event, although his presence was not confirmed for security reasons. Along with him, 45 delegations, 27 of them represented at the highest level.
Five minutes before two in the afternoon, Don Felipe and Doña Letizia landed in Katowice. Delegations arrived sporadically at the concentration camp and gathered in a tent. Another, much larger one, hosted the central event of the day. A white structure of scaffolding and plastic was erected around the Auschwitz station.
This was where the prisoners arrived by train, on a journey that was already a torture. In unventilated, cramped freight cars, they had to take turns standing or sitting, with no possibility of using a bathroom or showering. Upon disembarking from the trains, they received the first blows, were forced to leave their belongings, and began a period of detention and horror. One of those wagons occupied the central place at the event.
The Jewish historian Marian Turski, 98, who spent 13 months in Auschwitz and survived one of the death marches, began the event by recalling that "now only a handful of survivors remain who share this misery, who live to see freedom." A small number that can still testify to their history, which should serve as a tribute to "millions of victims who never told us what they felt, what they experienced, simply because they were consumed by that massive destruction," he said. Turski pointed out that "now we see antisemitism" and encouraged not to be afraid and to "show courage" when "today Hamas denies the massacre of October 7," referring to the attacks that led to the new war between Israel and Gaza.
The nearly three thousand guests in the tent followed his testimony with great attention and solemn silence. On the right side of the tent, in order, were seated Sergio Matarella, President of Italy, Kings Felipe and Letizia alongside Guillermo and Máxima of the Netherlands. They were followed by Felipe and Matilde of Belgium, Carlos III and the kings Frederik and Mary of Denmark. Behind them, the Macron couple, the President of Austria and his wife, Haakon, Stéphanie, and Guillaume of Luxembourg, Victoria of Sweden, German President Steinmeier, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Israeli Minister of Culture.
Janina Iwanska came from a Catholic family that hid two Jews in their home when deportations began. They were discovered one day when her parents were not at home, but she was. She was arrested and taken to Auschwitz. She was 14 years old. She endured a death march and upon being liberated, she discovered that her entire family had been murdered.
"The winters here were horrible, a lot of work and little to eat, if you didn't like something, you were killed," she recalled. "The camp murders were with gas, that's why the crematoriums were built, in April of that year they were ready, and from that moment on, the killing machine began operation. Everything they did here was to kill people. It is difficult to calculate how many they killed, many were recorded but others were not," she asserted.
Tova Friedman arrived at Auschwitz at the age of five on a Sunday in 1944 with her mother. They survived because on the day they were supposed to be killed in Block 11, the gas system broke down because there had been an attack on the pipes. On the day of the death march, they hid among corpses, where they were found by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. "All my life I have thought that this day is my birthday. I celebrate it every year, in fact, I have friends who do not know that I have another birthday because this is the one that matters," she began in an English speech.
"My memories are very vivid thanks to my mother, who never hid anything," she assured that she still remembers "the cries and prayers of so many desperate women." And she moved the attendees by stating: "As a five-year-old girl, I thought that all Jewish children had to die." Now we all have an obligation, she said: "Not only to remember. 80 years after the liberation, the world is once again in crisis. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its existence. We regret not only the loss of soldiers but also the lack of truth in our society," she stated.
Leon Weintraub managed to escape from Auschwitz at 17, after a few months in the camp. He did so on a train transporting prisoners to another camp. The second train taking him to a third camp was bombed by the Allies, allowing him to escape on foot and reach a city occupied by the French and be liberated. "This was a place where the technique of mass murder was introduced." This anniversary serves "as a warning of the growing anti-democratic movements in the world," he said at the end of his words.