European digital editor
Their numbers reduce, but the voices of the Auschwitz survivors remain strong.
“We have stripped of our entire humanity,” said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of the four who spoke next to the infamous death door in the Birkenau’s extermination camp.
World leaders and European royal royal shoulders rubbed 56 survivors of Hitler’s genocide on Monday, as they have marked 80 years since its liberation.
“We were victims in a moral vacuum,” said Tova Friedman, who described the testimony of the horror of the Nazi genocide as a five and a half-half of a girl who clung to her mother’s hand.
History warnings were clear: surviving more than everyone understood the risk of intolerance, and anti -Semitism was a canary in the coal mine.
Nazis killed 1.1 million people in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.
Almost one million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and an unknown number of gay men.
This was one of the six death camps he built in the occupied Poland in 1942, and was the biggest.
Under the huge, white tent that covered the entrance to the death camp, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Cywinski, announced the plea to protect the memory of what happened, because the survivors died.
“Pain memory, memory helps, leads memory … Without memory you have no history, no experience, no reference point,” he said, as they survived, many of them carry blue-white striped scarves to symbolize the clothing of the prisoner.
The memory was a word today, marked around the world as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has advocated that Poland can be entrusted with preserving the memory of six death camps in his territory, in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmn. “We are the guardians of the memory,” he said, after laying a wreath on the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed in Auschwitz, a 3 km (1.85 mile) concentration camp from Birkenau.
Far from the entrance to the Nazi death camp, in the United Nations in New York, Secretary General António Guterres said that “memory is not just a moral act, it’s a call to action,” and warned that the denial of the Holocaust was expanding and hatred was widespread to be mixed around the world.
He quoted the Italian survivor Primo Levi, who wrote his memories of the campsites for offspring, but failed to withstand the scars of what he testified. According to colleague survivor Elie Wiesel, Levi “died in Auschwitz 40 years later.”
Among those who traveled to southern Poland on Monday at the commemoration of the day, the Red Army released Auschwitz were King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxim from the Netherlands, King Felipe and Queen Letizia from Spain, and King of Danish King Frederik and Queen Mary .
Karlo III became the first service of the British monarch to visit Auschwitz and could see tears as he listened to the reports of the four survivors.
As he toured the camp, he put a wreath in memory of the victims.
The sources close to the king said it was a deep visit for him, and one assistant described it as a “deep personal pilgrimage.”
A few hours earlier, he said that the recall of “evil past” remained a “vital task”.
Visiting the Center for the Jewish Community in Krakow, which opened 17 years ago, King said that the Jewish community in Krakow was “reborn” from the Holocaust ashes, and that the construction of a kind and compassionate world for the future generation was “Holy Task of all of us.”
British survivors in Poland, 94, was released by a concentration camp in Bergen Belsen and attended an event on Monday in Auschwitz.
“We have seen the consequences of campsites and beating and hatred,” she told the BBC. “And what [children] They are taught under the circumstances of the despot can be so harmful, not only to them, but to everything. So we really have to protect ourselves from that. “
Lord Pickles, a special envoy in the UK for the post-Holocaust issues, which is the chairman of the International Council for Remembrance of the Holocaust, warned that “distortion” threatens the legacy and historical truth of the Holocaust.
Listening to the survivors in the tent in Birkenau, the BBC said that “we saw the transmission from memory to history”, because now it is very little probably that the survivors will maintain much longer speeches.
“It’s very scary and I don’t believe we are in the Holocaust Post world.”
Additional Laura Gozzi reporting in London.
