Survivors return to Auschwitz 75 years after liberation

Survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gathered Monday for commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, using the testimony of Holocaust survivors to warn about the signs of rising anti-Semitism and hatred in the world today.

In all, more than 200 survivors of the camp were expected, many of them elderly Jews who have traveled far from homes in Israel, the United States, Australia, Peru, Russia, Slovenia and elsewhere. Many lost parents and grandparents in Auschwitz or other Nazi death camps, but today were being joined in their journey back by children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

Survivors dressed in blue and white striped caps and scarves symbolic of the uniforms prisoners wore at the camp, passed through its chilling “Arbeit macht Frei” (German for “Work sets you free”) black wrought-iron gate.

Accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, they laid floral wreaths by the Death Wall in Auschwitz where the Nazis shot dead thousands of prisoners.

“We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again,” Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, said earlier at the former death camp, his voice breaking with emotion.

Thirty-five members of his immediate and extended family of Romanian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany’s camps that has come to symbolize the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Most of the 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz were Jewish, but among those imprisoned there were also Poles and Russians, and they will also be among those at a commemoration Monday led by Duda and the head of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is also expected to attend, along with President Reuven Rivlin.

Survivors carry a wreath at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945.

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, US Vice President Mike Pence, French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prince Charles.

Politics intruded on that event after Putin accused Poland of cooperating with Germany in 1938, while Duda charged Russia with downplaying its own role in invading the Eastern European nation in cooperation with the Nazis the following year.

Duda said he declined the invitation to Jerusalem because he would not have an opportunity to respond should Putin use the event to again lob accusations of anti-Semitism against Poland.

The Yad Vashem memorial museum said the speakers represented the victors of World War II and the country that perpetrated the Holocaust — Germany.

A Holocaust survivor cries as he pays his respect at the death wall at the memorial site of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz during ceremonies to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2020. (JANEK SKARZYNSKI / AFP)

Organizers of the event in Poland, the Auschwitz-Birkenau state memorial museum and the World Jewish Congress, have sought to keep the spotlight on survivors.

“This is about survivors. It’s not about politics,” Lauder said Sunday as he went to the death camp with several survivors.

Lauder warned that leaders must do more to fight anti-Semitism, including by passing new laws to fight it.

On the eve of the commemorations, survivors, many leaning on their children and grandchildren for support, walked through the place where they had been brought in on cattle cars and suffered hunger, illness and near death. They said they were there to remember, to share their histories with others, and to make a gesture of defiance toward those who had sought their destruction.

People arrive for commemorations at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

For some, it is also the burial ground for their parents and grandparents, and they will be saying kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

“I have no graves to go to and I know my parents were murdered here and burned. So this is how I pay homage to them,” said Yvonne Engelman, a 92-year-old who came from Australia, joined by three more generations now scattered around the globe.

She recalled being brought in from a ghetto in Czechoslovakia by cattle car, being stripped of her clothes, shaved and put in a gas chamber. By some miracle, the gas chamber that day did not work, and she went on to survive slave labor and a death march.

A 96-year-old survivor, Jeanette Spiegel, was 20 when she was brought to Auschwitz, where she spent nine months. Today she lives in New York City and is fearful of rising anti-Semitic violence in the United States.

“I think they pick on the Jews because we are such a small minority and it is easy to pick on us,” she said, fighting back tears. “Young people should understand that nothing is for sure, that some terrible things can happen and they have to be very careful. And that, God forbid, what happened to the Jewish people then should never be repeated.”