Holocaust survivors mark Auschwitz liberation 75 years on
19:06
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a dwindling number of elderly Holocaust survivors gathered at the former German Nazi death camp on Monday to honor its over 1.1 million mostly Jewish victims amid fresh concerns over antisemitism.
More than 200 survivors came from across the globe to the camp the Nazis built in Oświęcim in then-occupied Poland, to share their testimony as a stark warning amid a recent surge of anti-semitic attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them deadly.
“We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again,” Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, told reporters at the former death camp on Sunday, his voice breaking, heavy with emotion.
Thirty-five members of his immediate and extended family of Romanian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany's camps that has come to symbolize the six million European Jews killed in the Holocaust.
From mid-1942 the Nazis systematically deported Jews from all over Europe to six camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Organizers insist that Monday’s memorial ceremony must focus above all on what survivors have to say rather than the bitter political feuds that have tainted the run-up to the anniversary.
Royals, presidents and prime ministers from nearly 60 countries will attend the ceremony, but no top world leaders.
Israel hosted US Vice President Mike Pence, French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin among others at a high-profile Holocaust forum marking the anniversary in Jerusalem Thursday.
It was seen as rivaling the event in Poland, which has tricky relations with Israel. Earlier, Putin sparked outrage in the West after falsely accusing Poland of colluding with German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and contributing to the outbreak of WWII.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, who called out Putin, snubbed the Jerusalem forum after he was denied the opportunity to speak there while the Russian president was given the floor.
