OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but the Germans also murdered many Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology.
Elderly camp survivors, some wearing blue-and-white striped scarves that recall their prison uniforms, walked together to the the Death Wall, where prisoners were executed, including many Poles who resisted the occupation of their country.
They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost 6 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,” Duda said to reporters afterward.
He spoke of the “unimaginable pain” inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people, and described the dozens of survivors attending the observances Monday as “the last survivors coming to this site.”
“May the memory of all the dead live on, may they rest in peace,” he said.
In all, the Germans murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe's Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Across Europe, officials and others were pausing to remember.
“The Holocaust was a collective endeavor by thousands of ordinary people utterly consumed by the hatred of difference,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement. “That is the hatred we stand against today and it is a collective endeavor for all of us to defeat it.”
Later in the day, world leaders and royalty will join with elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s. Politicians, however, have not been asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom are expected, organizers are choosing to make them the center of the observances.
Among the leaders expected to attend are Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never sent both of its highest state representatives to the observances before, according to German news agency dpa.
It is a sign of Germany's continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation's crimes, even amid a growing far-right movement that would like to forget.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will also attend, while Britain's King Charles III will also be there, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway.
Russian representatives were in the past central guests at the anniversary observances in recognition of the Soviet liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, and the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Associated Press writers Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka in London contributed.
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Vanessa Gera, The Associated Press
