Friday, Jan 28, 2005
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BRZEZINKA (POLAND), JAN. 27. World leaders and death camp survivors mourned victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, gathering on Thursday at the place where Nazi doctors once sent new arrivals to the gas chambers. Candles flickered in the winter gloom atop the track leading into the vast, snow-covered camp at Birkenau. The ceremony opened with the sound of an approaching train. Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Moshe Katsav of Israel were to speak at the ceremony. The German President, Horst Koehler, attended but was to remain silent in token acknowledgment of his country's role as perpetrator of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz and the neighbouring camp at Birkenau, or Brzezinka in Polish, on January 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, had died at the two camps from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.
New arrivals
Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis. The ceremony was held on Thursday on the spot where new arrivals were subject to ``selection'' — meaning a few were deemed able to be worked to death while most were taken immediately to gas chambers. Girl Scouts brought blankets to elderly survivors sitting in the freezing cold and heavy snowfall. ``For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe,'' said survivor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Poland's Foreign Minister. When he arrived in 1940, he recalled, ``I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II.'' Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak (80) said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened. ``Today I'm remembering my father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us here,'' said Jozefiak, who is from Krakow. ``I drank water from a dirty pool and, to punish me, an SS man jumped on my arm and broke it and jumped on my chest and broke two ribs.''
Gas chamber
One day, he said, the Nazi guards lined them up and told some to go right, others left. He went left and his father went right and was taken to the gas chamber. ``The message today is: No more Auschwitz,'' Jozefiak said. ``But the world has learned nothing so far — you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere in the world. ``Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget,'' he warned. Earlier, at a youth forum in Krakow, participants applauded several surviving Soviet soldiers awarded for liberating the camp, and saw a video message from 92-year-old Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the Soviet unit that captured Auschwitz. He was too sick to travel from his home in New York. ``I would like to say to all the people on the earth: Unite, and do not permit this evil that was committed,'' Maj. Shapiro said in the recorded greeting. ``This should never be repeated, ever.'' AP
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