Survivors mark Auschwitz liberation
Print Edition
Auschwitz survivors and Israeli officials yesterday marked 69 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camp in southern Poland, in a ceremony that included a large group of Israeli lawmakers.
The ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations in memory of some 6 million Holocaust victims. Some 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews.
Some 20 survivors walked through the gate that bears the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free) sign and laid a wreath at the former camp’s Executions Wall.
Some 60 members of the Knesset, or half of the Israeli legislature, joined the survivors for the observances that included visits to the Auschwitz barracks which house a collection of victims’ belongings and hair, and a list of the names of some 4.2 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
In a ceremony in the Birkenau section of the camp, they also heard from one of the survivors about the Death March when some 15,000 people died after Nazis fleeing the advancing Soviet army in January 1945 forced inmates still able to walk to march west.
Israeli opposition leader Isaak Herzog said the lawmakers came “to cry, but also to be aware that such horror can take place again.”
The lawmakers will also meet Polish counterparts.
In Italy, meanwhile, President Giorgio Napolitano condemned as a “miserable provocation” threats against Rome’s Jewish community in recent days, including the delivery of packages containing pig heads.
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