Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp recalled their suffering as they marked the 75th anniversary of its liberation, returning to the place where they lost entire families and warning about the ominous growth of anti-Semitism and hatred in the world. “We have with us the last living survivors, the last among those who saw the Holocaust with their own eyes,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told the dignitaries at the commemoration, which included the German president as well as Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders. “The magnitude of the crime perpetrated in this place is terrifying but we must not look away from it and we must never forget it,” Duda said. About 200 camp survivors attended, many of them elderly Jews and non-Jews who have traveled from Israel, the United States, Australia, Peru, Russia, Slovenia and elsewhere. Many lost parents and grandparents in Auschwitz or other Nazi death camps, but were joined by children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. They gathered under an enormous, heated tent straddling the train tracks that had transported people to Birkenau, the part of the vast complex where most of the murdered Jews were killed in gas chambers and then cremated. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945. Jewish survivors told their stories, as did a Sinti, or Gypsy, woman who is now blind and delivered a few words that she said were “spoken from the heart” before having someone else read them. Most of the 1.1 million people murdered by the Nazi German forces at the camp were Jews, but other Poles, Russians and Roma were imprisoned there. Polish survivors walked with Duda through the camp’s gate early Monday wearing striped scarves that recalled the prison garb they wore more than 75 years ago. World leaders gathered in Jerusalem last week to mark the anniversary in what many saw as a competing observance. Among them were Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prince Charles. Politics intruded on that event, with Duda boycotting it in protest after Putin claimed that Poland played a role in triggering World War II. Duda had wanted a chance to speak before or after Putin to defend his nation’s record in face of those false accusations, but he was not given a speaking slot in Jerusalem. Those claims comes as many countries across Eastern Europe have in recent years been mythologizing their own people’s behavior during the war and suppressing knowledge of wrongdoing, something Poland’s government, too, has been criticized for. Duda said Monday he felt that in Jerusalem, “Polish participation in the epic fight against the Nazis was ignored.” Monday’s commemoration gave him a chance to defend his nation, and he used it to recall how Poland was invaded and occupied, losing 6 million of its citizens in the war, half of them Jews. He recalled how Poland fought the Germans on several fronts, warned the world in vain about the genocide of the Jews, and for decades has been a responsible custodian of Auschwitz and other sites of the German atrocities. “Distorting the history of World War II, denying the crimes of genocide and negating the Holocaust as well as an instrumental use of the Auschwitz for whatever purposes is tantamount to desecration of the memory of […]

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