Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, is the Jewish people’s memorial to the murdered Six Million and symbolizes the ongoing confrontation with the rupture engendered by the Holocaust. Containing the world’s largest repository of information on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is a leader in Shoah education, commemoration, research and documentation....
Should Auschwitz be left to decay?
USCHWITZ-BIRKENAU,
Poland, Jan. 27 - Genry Koptev Gomolov was just 18 when he first saw this place,
on Jan. 27, 1945. He had been drafted into the Red Army two years earlier and
was making his way on foot across the Polish countryside with the remains of his
battalion when they stumbled upon the Nazis' largest death camp.
"It was cold and gloomy with wet snow falling, like now," Mr. Gomolov said, riding a bus toward the camp for his first visit there in 60 years. He and two other former Red Army soldiers were guests of honor at a ceremony here Thursday marking the anniversary of the camp's liberation.
Officials from more than 30 countries gathered for the commemoration and called again for the world to "never forget" the horrors of the Holocaust, but it was recollections by the ever-dwindling number of witnesses that gave the day meaning.
"We saw the barbed wire and we understood it was a camp," Mr. Gomolov said, lifting a finger at a line of concrete posts studded with insulators and still strung with wire.
He recalled that once inside the camp he and his comrades found thousands of wraithlike people laughing and crying, singing and shouting, or simply staring dumbly at their liberators. He saw corpses stacked like cordwood and abandoned before the Nazis could set them on fire. He saw the crematories and the subterranean rooms he later learned were gas chambers.
"It made a deep impression," he said quietly, thick bifocals magnifying his eyes. He eased down from the bus and into the snow.
Thursday's cold penetrated the overcoats of the people gathered for the ceremony. It seeped into shoes, burned toes and turned hands raw. The discomfort only lasted a couple of hours but it was a stark indication of the suffering that inmates of this camp endured, without relief, except through death. Many people remarked on it.
"In wintertime, the mortality was terrible," said Sigmund Sobolweski, 81, who spent four and a half years in the camp.
Some survivors remember a bar, slightly more than three feet high, that SS officers used to separate children who could work from those too young to be useful. Those shorter were sent to the gas chambers. Many children, survivors say, sensed the danger and strained to reach above the bar.
Most people who arrived at the camp were sent to the gas chambers within hours. Others, deemed fit enough to work, were stripped, shaved and tattooed with an identity number on their arm.
Jozef Drozdz wore the coarse blue and white cap from his former prison uniform to the ceremony. He was captured by the Nazis in 1940, and worked on building the first phase of the Auschwitz complex before being moved through eight more camps. "The Nazis knocked my teeth out," he said, flashing his dentures in an even smile.
The ceremony began with the haunting sounds of train whistles, evoking the arrival of prisoners on a railroad that still runs deep into the camp and was lined Thursday with candles.
The presidents of Russia, Poland and Israel along with several camp survivors spoke to the assembled crowd, repeating the need to keep awareness of the Holocaust alive after the last survivors have died.
Simone Veil, a French lawmaker, spoke on behalf of Jewish victims, a million of whom died in the camp. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish foreign minister who was interned in the camp, spoke on behalf of Polish victims. Romani Rose, from Germany's Council of Romas, spoke for European Gypsies who were also interned and killed there.
The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, representing the liberators of Auschwitz, used the occasion to warn against compromising with terrorists. He has been criticized for his country's war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya, which has spawned a singularly violent movement. He said the Holocaust showed that just "as there were no 'good' and 'bad' fascists, there cannot be 'good' and 'bad' terrorists."
"We shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."
President Moshe Katsav of Israel said at an earlier event that the allies "did not do enough" to prevent the killing of Jews in World War II and called upon the European Union "not to allow Nazism to live in the imagination of the youth of Europe like some kind of horror show."
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at the earlier event, said, "The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and confronted."
But the comments underscored an important difference between the anti-Semitism of the 1930's that led to the Holocaust and that appearing more recently: while many governments across Europe approved or at least tolerated anti-Semitism then, it is uniformly condemned today.
Of all Thursday's speakers, the most impassioned was Merka Shevach, anelderly woman from Bialystok, Poland, who now lives in Israel. She took the microphone to give an unscheduled, impromptu speech as dusk fell.
"I was here naked as a young girl, I was 16," Ms. Shevach shouted to the crowd. "They brought my family here and burnt them, they stole my name and gave me a number."
She pulled back her sleeve to show the tattoo: 15755.
"Now," she said, "I have a country, I have an army, I have a president, I have a flag and this will never happen again."
As the ceremony ended, world leaders placed candles on a memorial set between the ruins of two crematories. A dozen thin spotlights reached into the sky, catching snowflakes in their beams. Other spotlights, mounted in the guard towers, swept the snowy fields.
Finally, a locomotive whistle blared and the train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematories were set ablaze to form two flaming lines through the snow.
The above material copied from the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/international/europe/28auschwitz.html
Auschwitz: World leaders learn the lessons of
the past
by Dr. Goldfinger
The commemoration of 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Nazi death camp was attended by leaders from 30 countries. The leaders were greeted in a morning Holocaust forum by Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, commander of the Soviet unit that freed the camp.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav pointed out that the site was now located in the EU. "Auschwitz must be placed in the central place of collective memory of the reunited Europe," Katsav said.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney reminded that the Holocaust occurred "in the heart of the civilized world" and added that "the story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted."
Ukraine’s new leader Viktor Yushchenko talked about the ordeal experienced by his father, a Soviet prisoner of war who was captured and placed in Auschwitz.
"This is a sacred place for me and my family. This is a place where
Andrei Yushchenko, my father, suffered.
"There will never be a Jewish question in my country, I vow that," he
said.
The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, who was representing the Soviet troops that liberated the Nazi camp spoke about the necessity to avoid any compromise with terrorists. He said the Holocaust demonstrated that just "as there were no ’good’ and ’bad’ fascists, there cannot be ’good’ and ’bad’ terrorists."
"We shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."
The occasion was used by many speakers to remind of the need to fight any
demonstrations of Anti-Semitism.
The above material linked from: http://www.financegates.com/news/world_news/2005-01-28/auschwitz_28012005.html
Awkward politics intrude at snowy Auschwitz
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Friday, January 28, 2005
OSWIECIM, POLAND -- The old men and women, bundled in thick blankets in front of thousands of tiny candles, returned yesterday to the spot where their parents and siblings had been hauled out of trains and gassed to death.
Six decades ago, this barren brick-lined landscape had been the murder site for as many as 1.5 million people, including more than a million Jews.
Yesterday, some of the world's most influential leaders came here to stand in the freezing cold, reflect on the remains of hundreds of thousands of people below their feet, and try to offer some condolence or apology for the horror that ended 60 years ago with the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camp complex.
The discomfort was visible on many leaders' faces, and it was not merely because of the blizzard conditions. This was not an easy anniversary to mark.
The camp, after all, was liberated by the Soviet Army, which then used its victory against the Nazis to imprison Poland, Hungary, East Germany and a dozen other places in a form of tyranny that was resented almost as much as the Nazis had been.
This created some awkward moments, as leaders struggled to thank the Soviets, including three surviving veterans in the audience, for freeing Auschwitz.
Pope John Paul handled the problem carefully in a speech delivered by one of his cardinals.
"The history of the Soviet Union's role in that war was complex, yet it must not be forgotten that in it, the Russians had the highest number of those who tragically lost their lives," he said.
But the Pontiff, who made his name speaking out against Soviet tyranny in his native Poland, also described the liberation of Auschwitz as "yet another stage in the decades-long struggle of this nation, my nation, for its fundamental rights among the peoples of Europe."
He noted that he had called for "historical justice for this nation, which had made such great sacrifices in the cause of Europe's liberation from the infamous Nazi ideology, and which had been sold into slavery to another destructive ideology: that of Soviet communism."
That allowed Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski to speak more magnanimously toward the Russian soldiers, to whom he presented Polish medals.
"With profound respect for the soldierly sacrifice of blood, Poland worships all the combatants, all of whom died a heroic death marching in the ranks of the Red Army to liberate our homeland from Nazi occupation," he said. "Together we bow our heads to their sacrifice."
No such humility was required for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who characterized the Auschwitz liberation as one step in a long trajectory of victory for the Soviet forces: "Today's ceremony is in fact the opening of the 60th anniversary of a great victory. . . . the celebration in Moscow in May, where many of us will gather again, will become its culminating event."
Mr. Putin also strode calmly over another difficult patch of rhetorical terrain that had given other leaders trouble this week: whether to use the Holocaust to draw attention to contemporary events, or to honour it as a unique and unrepeatable instance of near-successful genocide.
On Wednesday, Israeli President Ariel Sharon had admonished those who would liken his government's treatment of Palestinian refugees to the Nazi oppression of Jews.
Yesterday, though, Mr. Putin devoted part of his speech to a similar goal, likening the Nazi threat to "terrorists," a reference that most observers saw as a reference to the Chechen independence fighters who have been engaged in a struggle with Russia.
"Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," Mr. Putin said.
"Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism. . . . As there were no good and bad fascists there cannot be good and bad terrorists. Any double standards here are absolutely unacceptable and deadly dangerous for civilization."
Mr. Putin alone did not mention Jews in his speech, even though they were by far the largest group of victims at Auschwitz. But he devoted a speech in the morning, in a theatre in Krakow, to both crediting Russia with freeing the Jews and apologizing for modern Russian anti-Semitism.
"Six hundred thousand Soviet soldiers gave their lives here, and by paying that price saved from total destruction not only the Jewish people, but many other peoples, too," he said.
"But even in our country, in Russia, which did the most to fight fascism, to defeat fascism, which did the most to save the Jewish people, even in our country nowadays we do, unfortunately, sometimes see manifestations of this disease [of anti-Semitism]. And I, too, feel shame about that."
Linked from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050128/AUSCHWITZ28/TPInternational/Europe
'How could this ever have happened?'
Dusted by falling snow and surrounded by barbed wire, world leaders mourned the victims of the Holocaust yesterday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the biggest Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Vowing that the World War II atrocity must never be forgotten, the leaders and survivors lit candles in the ruins of the camp, where brick barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. Auschwitz claimed a fifth of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
"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 Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland’s foreign minister. "I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II."
As many as 1.5 million people were gassed, shot, starved or abused to death at Auschwitz in occupied Poland, the deadliest and most notorious killing facility set up by Nazi Germany.
Gypsies, Poles and Russians died there, but more than a million of the victims were Jews, brought into the camp in cattle boxcars that unloaded the passengers right outside the gas chambers. Most were sent directly to their deaths, but some were selected for slave labour. Stripped and shaved, an identity number was tattooed on their arms.
In an echo of those times, a loud train whistle sounded across the snowy landscape to herald the start of yesterday’s ceremony. At the end, a single railroad track erupted in flames and blinding searchlights crisscrossed the camp’s grounds.
Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, by the advancing Soviet army whose stunned soldiers released 7,000 emaciated prisoners left behind as the Germans withdrew.
"The snow was falling like today, we were dressed in stripes and some of us had bare feet," said Polish survivor Kazimierz Orlowski, 84.
As darkness approached, world leaders, survivors and European royalty lit candles of remembrance at a monument to the victims.
"I want to say to all people around the world: This should not happen again," said Anatoly Shapiro, commander of troops who first entered Auschwitz.
"I saw the faces of the people we liberated – they went through hell," he told an earlier ceremony in the southern Polish city of Krakow, some 70 kilometres from Auschwitz.
Canadian Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson was among the more than 5,000, including 30 heads of state, who attended the ceremony. The presidents of Israel, Germany and Russia – loosely representing the victims, perpetrators and liberators – were there.
"It is impossible and unfathomable to comprehend that people are capable of such atrocities," said Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Yet we see the railroad, which brought whole trains crammed with victims, and gas chambers with their incinerators thought out in every detail ...
"We will never stop asking ourselves over and over again the same question: How could this ever have happened?"
Jewish leaders urged Europeans not to erase the history of Auschwitz from their conscience. "We fear anti-Semitism. We fear Holocaust denial, we fear a distorted approach by the youth of Europe," said Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
President Jacques Chirac, the first French leader to acknowledge France’s complicity in the Holocaust, said the European Union would stand united to counter anti-Semitism.
"Evil is embodied in this place, tearing at our hearts and burning our consciences for eternity," he said.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, attending a Liberal caucus meeting in Fredericton, N.B., said the commemoration was a reminder the world must be constantly on guard against hatred and evil. "We can and we must honour both those who lost their lives and those who survived."
Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak, 80, said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened.
"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."
Linked from: http://www.metronews.ca/news_feature_detail.asp?id=5965
World Leaders Mark Auschwitz Liberation
From Associated Press
BRZEZINKA, Poland — Frail survivors and humbled world leaders mourned the
victims of the Holocaust on Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz, and urged the world to never forget.
Candles flickered in the dusk at the sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death
camp, which Israeli President Moshe Katsav called "the capital of the
kingdom of death."
During World War II, 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the site.
Others who perished included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's
Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
The haunting commemoration was held at the place where new arrivals stumbled out
of railroad cattle cars and were met by Nazi doctors, who chose a few to be
worked to death; the rest were sent to gas chambers. Others died of starvation,
exhaustion, beatings and disease.
"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of
horror of the murdered people," said Katsav, one of 30 presidents and prime
ministers at the ceremony.
As night fell and the ceremony ended with the recording of a locomotive whistle
blaring from loudspeakers, half a mile of train tracks leading from the front
gate to the crematoriums were set ablaze — two flaming straight lines through
snow, toward death.
The world leaders, including Vice President Dick Cheney, placed candles in blue
lanterns on a low stone memorial.
About 6 million Jews died in Adolf Hitler's network of camps.
Survivor Franczisek Jozefiak, 80, of Krakow said, "Today I'm remembering my
father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us
here."
Auschwitz survivors remember
BRZEZINKA, Poland — Snowflakes swirled around the crematoriums and barbed wire of Auschwitz, and a shrill train whistle pierced the silence as frail survivors and humbled world leaders remembered the victims of the Holocaust yesterday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Candles flickered in the darkening winter gloom of the sprawling site, which Israeli President Moshe Katsav called "the capital of the kingdom of death."
During World War II, an estimated 1.5 million people — mostly Jews — were killed at the site. Others who perished there included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
The haunting commemoration was held at the place where new arrivals stumbled out of cattle cars and were met by Nazi doctors who chose a few to be worked to death while the rest were sent immediately to gas chambers. Others died of starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.
"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," Katsav said. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."
French parliamentarian Simone Veil, who was imprisoned here as a 17-year-old, pondered the children who didn't survive, among them her sister.
"What would have become of them, these millions of Jewish children ... murdered here or in the ghettos or in other death camps? Would they have become philosophers? Artists? Great scientists? Or perhaps just skilled craftsmen or mothers of families? All I know is that I weep whenever I think of them," she said.Many of the survivors displayed their inmate numbers on their clothing or wore the rough striped caps that were issued to prisoners. Some wore the red triangle patches that the Nazis issued to Polish political prisoners to distinguish them from Jews.
As the generation of survivors gradually dies off, yesterday's commemoration took on added meaning.
"In my life I have attended hundreds of regional and international ceremonies, but I do not think there will be another similar to this one," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish underground fighter, prisoner No. 4427 at Auschwitz, and later Poland's foreign minister.
"The question to be asked of ourselves and the world is: How much of the truth about those horrible experiences of totalitarianism have we managed to pass down to younger generations? Much of it, I believe, but not enough," Bartoszewski said.
As night fell and the ceremony ended with a locomotive whistle blaring over loudspeakers, a half-mile of train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematoriums were set ablaze in a pyrotechnic display — two flaming rails amid the snow.
The 30 leaders, including Vice President Dick Cheney and presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France, placed candles shielded in blue lanterns on a low stone memorial. Soldiers of a Polish honor guard stood stiffly in the freezing wind. New Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko gently set down his candle and made the sign of the cross.
Germany's President Horst Koehler placed a candle but didn't speak, in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's attempt to wipe out Europe's Jews. In all, some 6 million Jews died in Hitler's network of camps, while several million non-Jews also perished.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau — the occupiers' names for Polish Oswiecim and Brzezinka — on Jan. 27, 1945.
At the ceremony, young girls brought blankets to survivors sitting in the cold.
Auschwitz survivor Gabi Neumann, 68, traveled from his home in Israel and held up a poster that bore the words, "Stop it before it happens again" and the yellow stars of the European Union flag distorted to resemble a swastika.
"I made this poster because anti-Semitism is a big problem in Europe," said Neumann, who was an 8-year-old when he was freed from the camp. Originally from Slovakia, he lost a grandmother at Auschwitz.
"But she has no grave," he said. "I am happy there is snow here because it keeps me from standing on her ashes."
Putin compared the Nazis to modern terrorists.
"Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."
Earlier in Krakow, Cheney noted that the Holocaust did not happen in some far-off place but "in the heart of the civilized world."
"The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," he said.
People at the ceremony expressed concern over recent incidents such as a walkout from an Auschwitz commemoration by far-right local legislators in Germany, and a statement from far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who minimized the brutality of Nazi rule during the occupation by German troops. He said it "was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders."
Linked from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002163119_holocaust28.html
USCHWITZ-BIRKENAU,
Poland, Jan. 27 - Genry Koptev Gomolov was just 18 when he first saw this place,
on Jan. 27, 1945. He had been drafted into the Red Army two years earlier and
was making his way on foot across the Polish countryside with the remains of his
battalion when they stumbled upon the Nazis' largest death camp.
"It was cold and gloomy with wet snow falling, like now," Mr. Gomolov said, riding a bus toward the camp for his first visit there in 60 years. He and two other former Red Army soldiers were guests of honor at a ceremony here Thursday marking the anniversary of the camp's liberation.
Officials from more than 30 countries gathered for the commemoration and called again for the world to "never forget" the horrors of the Holocaust, but it was recollections by the ever-dwindling number of witnesses that gave the day meaning.
"We saw the barbed wire and we understood it was a camp," Mr. Gomolov said, lifting a finger at a line of concrete posts studded with insulators and still strung with wire.
He recalled that once inside the camp he and his comrades found thousands of wraithlike people laughing and crying, singing and shouting, or simply staring dumbly at their liberators. He saw corpses stacked like cordwood and abandoned before the Nazis could set them on fire. He saw the crematories and the subterranean rooms he later learned were gas chambers.
"It made a deep impression," he said quietly, thick bifocals magnifying his eyes. He eased down from the bus and into the snow.
Thursday's cold penetrated the overcoats of the people gathered for the ceremony. It seeped into shoes, burned toes and turned hands raw. The discomfort only lasted a couple of hours but it was a stark indication of the suffering that inmates of this camp endured, without relief, except through death. Many people remarked on it.
"In wintertime, the mortality was terrible," said Sigmund Sobolweski, 81, who spent four and a half years in the camp.
Some survivors remember a bar, slightly more than three feet high, that SS officers used to separate children who could work from those too young to be useful. Those shorter were sent to the gas chambers. Many children, survivors say, sensed the danger and strained to reach above the bar.
Most people who arrived at the camp were sent to the gas chambers within hours. Others, deemed fit enough to work, were stripped, shaved and tattooed with an identity number on their arm.
Jozef Drozdz wore the coarse blue and white cap from his former prison uniform to the ceremony. He was captured by the Nazis in 1940, and worked on building the first phase of the Auschwitz complex before being moved through eight more camps. "The Nazis knocked my teeth out," he said, flashing his dentures in an even smile.
The ceremony began with the haunting sounds of train whistles, evoking the arrival of prisoners on a railroad that still runs deep into the camp and was lined Thursday with candles.
The presidents of Russia, Poland and Israel along with several camp survivors spoke to the assembled crowd, repeating the need to keep awareness of the Holocaust alive after the last survivors have died.
Simone Veil, a French lawmaker, spoke on behalf of Jewish victims, a million of whom died in the camp. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish foreign minister who was interned in the camp, spoke on behalf of Polish victims. Romani Rose, from Germany's Council of Romas, spoke for European Gypsies who were also interned and killed there.
The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, representing the liberators of Auschwitz, used the occasion to warn against compromising with terrorists. He has been criticized for his country's war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya, which has spawned a singularly violent movement. He said the Holocaust showed that just "as there were no 'good' and 'bad' fascists, there cannot be 'good' and 'bad' terrorists."
"We shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."
President Moshe Katsav of Israel said at an earlier event that the allies "did not do enough" to prevent the killing of Jews in World War II and called upon the European Union "not to allow Nazism to live in the imagination of the youth of Europe like some kind of horror show."
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at the earlier event, said, "The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and confronted."
But the comments underscored an important difference between the anti-Semitism of the 1930's that led to the Holocaust and that appearing more recently: while many governments across Europe approved or at least tolerated anti-Semitism then, it is uniformly condemned today.
Of all Thursday's speakers, the most impassioned was Merka Shevach, anelderly woman from Bialystok, Poland, who now lives in Israel. She took the microphone to give an unscheduled, impromptu speech as dusk fell.
"I was here naked as a young girl, I was 16," Ms. Shevach shouted to the crowd. "They brought my family here and burnt them, they stole my name and gave me a number."
She pulled back her sleeve to show the tattoo: 15755.
"Now," she said, "I have a country, I have an army, I have a president, I have a flag and this will never happen again."
As the ceremony ended, world leaders placed candles on a memorial set between the ruins of two crematories. A dozen thin spotlights reached into the sky, catching snowflakes in their beams. Other spotlights, mounted in the guard towers, swept the snowy fields.
Finally, a locomotive whistle blared and the train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematories were set ablaze to form two flaming lines through the snow.
Linked from: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/international/europe/28auschwitz.html
Europe Remembers Auschwitz Dead and Its Own Darkest
Hour
Auschwitz is, as one of its survivors called it Thursday, the world's biggest cemetery. But there are no graves, no markers, only the ashes of the estimated 1.5 million people who died in the camp's gas chambers or perished from exhaustion, starvation or disease. Their corpses were later incinerated.
More than 30 heads of state and government and nearly 2,000 people who survived the horrors of the camp attended the ceremony, which marked its liberation by Soviet troops 60 years ago on a cold, snowy day, at the spot where Nazi doctors sent new arrivals to the gas chambers.
The ceremony began with the evocative sound of a train bearing victims of Nazi persecution to the camp, the most notorious in the archipelago of the Third Reich's death factories.
When the trains would arrive from various parts of Europe, the doctors on the platform would swiftly decide who was fit to work, and who went directly to the gas chambers.
Most of the victims of Auschwitz were Jews, but there were also Gypsies, resistance fighters from across Europe, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and tens-of-thousands of Poles.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav described Auschwitz as the most horrendous crime scene in human history. "It seems as if you can still hear the dead cry out. ¡¦ When I step on the earth of the death camps, I am seized by a trembling fear, lest I tread on the ashes of the victims mixed in Europe's soil," he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the Nazis to today's terrorists. "But today, we shall not only remember the past, but also be aware of the threats of the modern world," he said. "Among them is terrorism, and it's no less dangerous and cunning than Fascism. It is equally cruel. It has already claimed thousands of innocent lives. There were no good or bad Fascists or Nazis. There cannot be good or bad terrorists."
But the anniversary was less notable for the ringing pronouncements of the assembled leaders than it was for the quiet testimony of those who survived Auschwitz, and who are determined to keep the memory of what happened at the camp alive.
One of them is Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who went on to become Poland's foreign minister in the 1990s. "The question to be asked of ourselves and of the world is how much of the truth about those horrible experiences of totalitarianism we managed to pass down to the younger generation. I think that much, but not enough," he said.
And Simone Weil, one of France's leading intellectuals and politicians, who also survived Auschwitz, worries that mankind has not yet learned the lesson of the Holocaust. "And yet, the wish that we all have, which has been so often expressed - never again, never again - has not been respected, because, after all, since then, other genocides have been perpetrated," he said.
This was probably the last time the remaining Auschwitz survivors would be able to come together at the camp where they suffered so much. They are old now, but they are adamant that what they and all the people who passed through the Nazi death factories experienced should never be forgotten.
VOA News
Linked from: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200501/200501280004.html
Linked from: http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5498804
| Key facts on the Nazi Auschwitz death camp |
|
|
| Between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people died at
Auschwitz, of whom about 1 million were Jewish. Other groups of people who died included Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or religious faith. The complex contained three camps and at least 36 sub-camps which were built outside the town of Oswiecim, on an isolated 40 sq km site, between 1940 and 1942. May 20, 1940 - German forces occupying Poland set up Auschwitz I in an old Polish army barracks which later served as the administrative centre for the whole complex. It was the site of the deaths of around 70,000 Polish intellectuals and Soviet prisoners of war. June 14, 1940 - The first transport of Polish political prisoners from Tarnow arrives at Auschwitz. Among the 728 Poles there were a number of Jews. The entrance to Auschwitz I is marked with the sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes you free). Sept 3, 1941 - First victims gassed to death in Auschwitz using Zyklon-B are 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Jews from the infirmary. Oct 1941 - Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, which could accommodate over 100,000 inmates opens. It would become the main site of mass killings. Jan 1942 - Four large gas chambers added to Auschwitz II camp, capable of disposing of about 2000 a day people per day. Three more extermination camps opened to step up killings. Auschwitz III supplied forced labour for the nearby I.G Farben plant. Jan 1942 - Senior Nazis meet at the Wannsee conference to co-ordinate the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and to agree on a definition of "Jew". March-June 1943 - New crematoria put into operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau. By 1944, 6000 a day were being killed. Nov-Dec 1944 - Germans dismantle, bury and plant over Auschwitz's gas chambers and crematoria. Jan 1945 - Auschwitz evacuated as the Soviet Red Army advances, many prisoners killed in camp, 58,000 compelled to leave and most die during forced march. Jan 27, 1945 - Soviet soldiers enter Auschwitz and free the remaining 7000 prisoners. About 200,000 inmates of the camp from 1940-45 survived. Out of a total of about 7000 guards at Auschwitz, including 170 female staff, 750 were prosecuted and punished once Nazi Germany was defeated. (Sources: Reuters/Oxford Companion to the Second World War/BBC) |
Linked from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10008448
Katsav at Auschwitz: Mind won't grasp
By DAVID HOROVITZ AND JPOST STAFF
President Moshe Katsav delivered his address at the ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auchwtiz-Birkenau Thursday in Poland.
More than 40 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gathered in Auschwitz on Thursday, along with survivors and liberators, to commemorate the anniversary.
In an emotional address, the Israeli president said, "The mind refuses to comprehend what had taken place here. Auchwtiz-Birkenau is human kind's worst ever crime site. The largest cemetery of the Jewish people.
"We stand here and witness the remains of the gas chambers, the final stop of the railroad tracks, which brought here, from all over Europe, millions to the burning furnaces. It appears as if we can still here their cry.
"At this place, the Nazis carried out their non-stop industry of genocide. The industry of killing the Jewish people in Europe.
"Despite the horror, the Jewish people rose from the ashes and returned home. Not three hours flight away, we reestablished our homeland, which was not able to take in those who were murdered.
"We are a proud and determined people, looking towards the future in hope and faith. Our strong ties with nations whose leaders stand here today, provide some sort of comfort and security," Katsav concluded.
(Click here for full text of speech)
As Katsav was winding up his speech, a woman sitting in the rows of survivors got up from her seat and walked over to the speakers' podium, where she stood, waiting with arms folded until the Israeli President finished talking. As Katsav finished, Merka Szevach, an Auschwitz survivor, began a tirade against what had occurred to her and her family at the death camp. Pulling up her the sleeve on her sweater, Szevach railed, " They took away my name and gave me a number. I was no longer Merka Szevach. Why? Why did they do that, and why did they burn my whole family here? I now have a country, an army and a president."
Earlier, Katsav delivered a blistering attack on the failure of the Allied forces to bomb Auschwitz and the railroad leading to it in the final months of WWII, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives could still have been saved.
Speaking at a ceremony in Krakow's main theater shortly before traveling to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Katsav said, "sixty years later we still find it hard to believe that the world stood silent" as the killing went on. "The allies did not do enough to stop the Holocaust," he said, "To stop the destruction of Jewish people. The gates of countries around the world, the gates to Israel, were kept closed in the face of those who tried to escape."
"The Allies knew about the destruction of the Jews and didn't act to stop it," the president said. "Hundreds of thousands could have been saved." Katsav noted that air sorties passed next to Auschwitz-Birkenau, "but Auschwitz was not bombed bombing the railways would have prevented the destruction of the Jews. The Germans knew that they were going to lose, but they continued, even accelerated, the destruction of the Jews,' Katsav said, and the Allies did not stop them.
Speaking at the same event, US Vice President Richard Cheney noted that in the death camps of Europe some of the greatest crimes the human mind can conceive were committed.
While the scale of killing was unthinkable, Cheney said it was crucial to remember that each victim had a name, a home, and hopes for the future. Each was an individual who "no man had any right to harm."
Linked from: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1106796048158
Leaders, survivors mark Auschwitz liberation
BRZEZINKA, Poland -- World leaders have joined elderly Holocaust survivors in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
Thursday's ceremony at the site of the main death factory at Birkenau started with the mournful whistle of an imaginary train on the tracks that brought more than a million deportees to their deaths.
Candles flickered atop the track leading into the vast, snow-covered camp amid a steady snowfall and sub-freezing temperatures.
"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," said Israeli President Moshe Katsav said.
"When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."
Elderly survivors, many accompanied by younger relatives, attended the ceremony between the rusting barbed-wire fences, facing a monument to the victims.
"I am not here to talk about what happened. My only aim is to light a candle for my mother, whose ashes are who knows where in this camp," said Jan Wojciech Topolewski, a former prisoner whose mother died in Auschwitz.
Girl Scouts brought blankets and coffee to the survivors sitting in the freezing weather.
"Today I'm remembering my father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us here," said Franciszek Jozefiak, 80.
"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."
Russian President Vladimir Putin told the gathering the world must remember the Auschwitz tragedy in the current fight against international terrorists.
"Terrorism is as dangerous as Nazism, killing innocent people," Putin said. "Just as there cannot be any good or bad fascists, [there] can't be any good or bad terrorists."
French President Jacques Chirac, the first leader of his country to acknowledge French complicity in the Holocaust, said the European Union would stand united to counter anti-Semitism, Reuters reported.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland's foreign minister, said: "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."
"I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II."
Among the other world leaders at the ceremony are Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, German President Horst Kohler, Britain's Prince Edward, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Belgium's King Albert.
Vatican representatives read a message from Pope John Paul II.
The leaders placed candles at the monument to the victims of Auschwitz as they left.
Before the ceremony, survivors and officials met in nearby Krakow for a Holocaust forum, where they heard from one of the Soviet liberators.
"I would like to say to all the people on the earth: This should never be repeated, ever," said Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, 92, who commanded the first troops who entered Auschwitz.
"I saw the faces of the people we liberated -- they went through hell," he said in a recorded video greeting from New York, where he lives. Shapiro was too ill to travel to the commemoration.
The forum at Krakow's Slovacki theater opened with applause for Shapiro and three other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
Kwasniewski awarded one of the veterans, Yakov Vinnichenko, the Polish Officer's Cross. Two others, Genri Koptev-Gomolov and Nikolai Chertkov, were awarded the Cavalry Cross of the Polish Republic, The Associated Press reported.
"These commemorations are intended to promote knowledge of Auschwitz as widely as possible and bring the truth about the camps to the younger generation," Kwasniewski told Polish state radio, Reuters reported.
Putin acknowledged to the morning gathering that anti-Semitism and xenophobia had surfaced in his country.
Tackling an issue the Kremlin has been accused of failing to confront directly, Putin said many in the world should be ashamed of new manifestations of anti-Semitism six decades after the defeat of fascism, AP reported.
"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism, for the victory of fascism, which did most to save the Jewish people, even in our country we sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said to long applause.
Cheney told the gathering that the Holocaust did not happen in some far-off place but "in the heart of the civilized world."
"The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," he said.
"We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror."
Ukraine's newly elected president, Viktor Yushchenko, was greeted with a standing ovation when he entered the hall.
He said he brought his children to the event and spoke of his father, a wounded Soviet prisoner of war who survived Auschwitz.
"This is a sacred place for me and my family," Yushchenko said. "This is a place where Andrei Yushchenko, my father, suffered. There will never be a Jewish question in my country, I vow that."
In Brussels, members of the European Parliament stood in a minute of silence to pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and to mark the anniversary.
"Everyone is surprised such a thing happened, but it did," said EU Parliament President Josep Borrell. "It's difficult to pay just memory to it. It is a battle against the weakness of memory, something which should never happen again."
The EU assembly then passed a resolution by 617 votes to 0, with 10 abstentions, condemning anti-Semitism and racism and paying homage to the victims of Nazi Germany, AP reported.
And in Germany, a Holocaust survivor warned his countrymen to be vigilant against anti-Semitism, particularly in the Muslim world. Arno Lustiger told German leaders gathered in parliament for the national Holocaust Remembrance Day that everyone must fight anti-Semitism, AP reported.
"The hate toward Israel and its people, the denial of the right to life of the Jewish state by the Arab-Muslim world, the violence against Jews and their institutions fills me with pain and anger," Lustiger said.
"Anti-Semitism and particularly its Islamic stamp should not just be the concern of the Jews because forces are working in Europe that want to bomb our civilization back into the Middle Ages," he said.
Parliament president Wolfgang Thierse called on Germans to fight continued anti-Semitism in Germany, especially in light of the regional resurgence of the far-right National Democratic Party -- which took nearly 10 percent of the vote in elections in the eastern state of Saxony last year.
Birkenau -- the largest of the camps at Auschwitz -- is where Nazi doctors decided which deportees would be sent to forced labor and which would be condemned to immediate death in the gas chambers.
An estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, most of the Jews, were killed in the gas chambers or died of disease, starvation, abuse and exhaustion at Auschwitz.
When Soviet troops reached the camp 60 years ago, they found some 7,000 survivors, many barely alive.
The retreating Nazis had destroyed the gas chambers and crematoria and many of the barracks, and forced most of the remaining prisoners into the snow on a "death march" to camps further west.
Auschwitz is the most notorious of the death camps set up by Adolf Hitler to carry out his "final solution," the murder of Europe's Jewish population.
Six million Jews died in the Nazi camps, along with several million others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.
CNN's Chris Burns contributed to this report from Auschwitz.
Linked from: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/01/27/auschwitz.anniversary/index.html
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, is the Jewish people’s memorial to the murdered Six Million and symbolizes the ongoing confrontation with the rupture engendered by the Holocaust. Containing the world’s largest repository of information on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is a leader in Shoah education, commemoration, research and documentation....
