Politicians won't speak at Auschwitz ceremony

Politicians won't speak at Auschwitz ceremony

Others will include heads of state and government - among them presidents of Germany and France Joachim Gauck and Francois Hollande, and delegations from 49 countries, among them Russia, represented by the head of the Kremlin administration, Sergei Ivanov, and Serbia, represented by Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Aleksandar Vulin. But they will appear "only as audience," according to reports.

Halina Birenbaum, Kazimierz Albin and Roman Kent are Polish Jews and survivors who will be speaking during 70th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On behalf of all victims of the Holocaust and the dead and the living they will repeat in front of the former gas chambers the message that "it happened, therefore it can happen again; it can happen, and it can happen everywhere" - the words written by another survivor, Italian Jew Primo Levi, a writer and chemist.

Beta is reporting that this 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp is marked in Europe in a darker atmosphere than the 60th anniversary, not only by representatives of Jewish communities, but also by politicians, especially after the attacks by Islamic radicals in France and the strengthening of extremist right wing in Europe that speak about the occurrence of "the same mechanisms as in the time of the rise of the Nazis" that led to the Holocaust and its six million victims, and attempted extermination of European Jews.

Starting in 1940, when the Nazis opened the concentration camp on the outskirts of Auschwitz in southern Poland, first for Poles, in 1942 making it the key place for the plan to exterminate Jews, at least 1.1 million people died there either in the gas chambers, as a result of the horrific conditions, or in the monstrous medical experiments carried out on the prisoners.

Most of the victims in Auschwitz were Jews from European countries, along with 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and at least 15,000 members of other nations of Europe.

The camp was liberated on January 27, 1945 by the Soviet Red Army soldiers, 231 of whom gave their lives during the operation.