Remembering Auschwitz: Survivors Lay Wreath at Execution Wall in Memory of Holocaust Victims
I’ve seen nothing close … to Belsen. The dead and the dying lay close together. I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice that rose above the gentle, undulating moaning. I found a girl. She was a living skeleton. Impossible to gauge her age, for she had practically no hair left on her head and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm, and gasping something. It was ‘English, English, medicine, medicine.’ And she was trying to cry but had not enough strength. And beyond her, down the passage and in the hut, there were the convulsive movements of dying people. Too weak to raise themselves from the floor. They were crawling with lice and smeared with filth. … I had to look hard to see who was alive and who was dead. — Richard Dimbleby, reporter for the BBC, touring Belsen Concentration Camp just after it was liberated by the British, 1945
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, in memory of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, 72 years ago today, by troops of the Soviet Union. It’s more than that, though. It’s also in memory of the 6 million Jews (1.1 million at Auschwitz alone) who lost their lives during Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier pointed out that the name “Auschwitz” represents all the death camps and the whole of Nazi “persecution and murder machinery” that still stand as part of Germany’s history, reported The Telegraph.
During the height of Hitler’s regime, about 12,000 Jews were slaughtered daily by shooting and gassing — others died of starvation or disease. Dimbleby reported that thousands were dying from typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, dysentery or childbirth fever and 25,000 were starving. There was a “smell, sickly and thick, the smell of death and decay, corruption and filth,” he said.
Today, inside the gate that says “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free), about 40 Auschwitz survivors placed wreaths at the execution wall, lit candles, prayed and remembered those who died there so many years ago. Survivors wore striped scarves, to commemorate the prison uniforms the Jews were given upon their arrival at the camp.
Janina Malec’s parents were killed at the execution wall. She survived the camp. Malec told the PAP news agency that, “as long as I live I will come here,” adding that the trip each year is a “pilgrimage.” The former Auschwitz concentration camp is now the world’s largest cemetery.
Israeli Vice-ambassador Ruth Cohen-Dar attended a separate commemoration at Warsaw’s Ghetto Heroes Memorial. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo wrote a letter to Friday’s participants in the ceremony, stating, “As each year, on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi-German Concentration and Death Camp, we bow our heads before the victims of Nazi terror and genocide, and unite in joint remembrance and mature responsibility for such events never to occur again.” She then paid homage to her countrymen who tried to save Jews from the concentration camps, calling them “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Cohen-Dar reminded attendees that 6 million Jews (1.5 million children) were killed during the Holocaust and it is “a duty to preserve the memory of the victims, also for future generations.” She wondered aloud, “We can only imagine what Poland and Warsaw would be like if they were all with us today.” (For more from the author of “Remembering Auschwitz: Survivors Lay Wreath at Execution Wall in Memory of Holocaust Victims” please click HERE)
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