Survivors of Auschwitz deliver warning from history as memories die out

Their numbers are dwindling but the voices of the Auschwitz survivors remain powerful.

“We were stripped of all humanity,” said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of four who spoke beside the notorious Death Gate at the Birkenau extermination camp.

World leaders and European royalty rubbed shoulders with 56 survivors of Hitler’s genocide of European Jews on Monday as they marked 80 years since its liberation.

“We were victims in a moral vacuum,” said Tova Friedman, who described witnessing the horrors of Nazi persecution as a five and a half year-old girl clinging to her mother’s hand.

She described watching from her hiding place at a labour camp, “as all my little friends were rounded up and driven to their deaths, while the heart-breaking cries of their parents fell on deaf ears”.

The warnings from history were clear: the survivors more than anyone understood the risks of intolerance, and antisemitism was the canary in the coal mine.

Under an enormous, white tent that covered the death camp entrance, Leon Weintraub appealed particularly to young people to be “sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment to people who are different”

The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.

Almost a million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and and unknown number of gay men.

This was one of six death camps the Nazis built in occupied Poland in 1942, and it was by far the biggest.

Another survivor to speak was Janina Iwanska, 94, a Catholic who was arrested as a child during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. She remembered how so-called Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele sent all the remaining Roma in the camp to their deaths at Birkenau, because he no longer needed them for his lethal medical experiments.

Marian Turski, 98, said only a few had survived the death camp and now they were but a handful. His thoughts turned to the millions of victims “who will never tell us what they experienced or they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction”.

The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, issued a plea to protect the memory of what had happened, as the survivors died out.

“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides… without memory you have no history, no experience, no point of reference,” he said, as survivors listened on, many of them wearing blue-and-white striped scarves to symbolise prisoners’ clothing.

Memory was the watchword of this day, marked around the world as International Holocaust Memorial Day.

Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged that Poland could be entrusted to preserve the memory of the six death camps on its territory, at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno.

“We are the guardians of memory,” said Duda, after laying a wreath at the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed at Auschwitz 1, the concentration camp 3km (1.85 miles) away from Birkenau.

Far away from the entrance to a Nazi death camp, at the United Nations in New York, Secretary General António Guterres said “remembrance is not only a moral act, it’s a call to action”, and warned that Holocaust denial was spreading and hatred was being stirred up across the globe.

He cited Italian survivor Primo Levi who wrote his memories of the camps for posterity but was unable to endure the scars of what he had witnessed. In the words of fellow survivor Elie Wiesel, Levi “died at Auschwitz 40 years later”.

Among those who travelled to southern Poland for Monday’s commemoration of the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz were King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, and Denmark’s King Frederik and Queen Mary.

Charles III became the first serving British monarch to visit Auschwitz, and could be seen wiping away tears as he listened to the accounts of the four survivors.

As he toured the camp he laid a wreath in memory of the victims.

Sources close to the King said it was a profound visit for him, and one aide described it as a “deeply personal pilgrimage”.

Hours earlier, he said remembering the “evils of the past” remained a “vital task”.

Visiting the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, which he opened 17 years ago, the King said the Krakow Jewish community had been “reborn” from the ashes of the Holocaust, and that building a kinder and more compassionate world for future generations was the “sacred task of us all”.

Polish-born British survivor Mala Tribich, 94, was liberated from the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, and attended Monday’s event at Auschwitz.

“We’ve seen the consequences of the camps and the beatings and hate,” she told the BBC. “And what [children] are taught under the circumstances of a despot can be so damaging, not only to them but to everything around. So we really must guard against it.”

Lord Pickles, the UK’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, who is chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, warned that “distortion” was threatening the legacy and historical truth of the Holocaust.

Having listened to the survivors inside the tent at Birkenau, he told the BBC that “we saw a transfer from memory into history”, because it was now very unlikely that survivors would be delivering speeches for much longer.

“That’s very daunting and I don’t believe we’re in a post Holocaust world.”

A survey across eight countries published last week suggested a widespread belief that another Holocaust could happen again. Concern was particularly high in the US and UK, according to the survey of 1,000 people in each country for Claims Conference.

Additional reporting by Laura Gozzi in London.