Auschwitz survivors convey a warning from history when memories disappear

The number is decreasing, but the voices of Auschwitz survivors remain powerful.

“We were deprived of all of humanity,” says 99 -year -old Leon Wyntraub, the oldest of four who spoke to the famous death gate at the camp to destroy Birkena.

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

“We were victims in a moral vacuum,” said this Friedman, who described a witness to the horrors of the Nazi pursuit as a girl of five and a half years, clutched in his mother’s hand.

She described the viewing from her hiding place in a labor camp, “since all my little friends were rounded and prompted until their deaths as their parents’ heartfelt shouts fell on deaf ears.”

History warnings were clear: the survivors more than anyone understood the risks of intolerance, and anti -Semitism was a canary in the coal mine.

Under a huge white tent that covered the entrance to the death camp, Leon Vyntraub was especially liked by young people to be “sensitive to all the expressions of intolerance and resentment towards people who are different”

The Nazis killed 1.1 million people in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.

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

It was one of the six death camps that the Nazis built in occupied Poland in 1942 and it was the largest.

Another survivor who spoke was Janina Izska, 94-year-old, a Catholic arrested as a child during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 in Birkenau because he no longer needed them for his deadly medical experiments.

Marian Turkish, 98, said only a few survived in the death camp and were now a handful. His thoughts focused on millions of victims, “who will never tell us what they have experienced or felt just because they were consumed by this mass destruction.”

The director of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Cywinski, asked to protect the memory of the incident as the survivors disappeared.

“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guidelines … Without memory you have no history, no experience, no guidance,” he said, as the survivors listened, many of them wear blue and white striped scarves to symbolize prisoners’ clothing.

The memory was the watch of this day, marked around the world as an International Holocaust Memory Day.

Polish President Andrzej Duda has promised that Poland can be entrusted to preserve the memory of the six camps of the death of its territory, in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzek, Maidank and Chelno.

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

Far from the entrance of the Nazi death camp in the United Nations organization in New York, Secretary -General Antonio Guteres said that “Remembrance is not only a moral act, but it is a call for action” and warned that the denial of the Holocaust is spreading and the hatred is yes is stirred all over the world.

He quoted the Italian surviving Primo Levy, who wrote his memories of offspring camps, but failed to withstand the signs of what he witnessed. According to a colleague, Eli Waisel survived, Levi “died in Auschwitz 40 years later”.

Among those who traveled to southern Poland for the memory of Monday on the day the Red Army released Auschwitz were King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima from the Netherland S

Charles III became the first service of British monarch to visit Auschwitz, and could be seen to wipe tears as he listened to the stories of the four survivors.

As he was going around the camp, he laid a wreath in memory of the victims.

Sources close to the King said it was a deep visit for him and an assistant described him as “deep personal worship”.

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

The visit of the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, which he opened 17 years ago, the King said that the Jewish community in Krakow was “reborn” by the ashes of the Holocaust and that the construction of a better and more compassionate world for future generations is “the sacred task To all of us. “

Born in the Polish British survivor of Trichi, 94, was released from a concentration camp in Bergen Belsen and attended the event on Monday in Auschwitz.

“We saw the consequences of camps and beatings and hatred,” she told the BBC. “And what (children) are learning in the circumstances of the despot can be so harmful, not only for them, but also for everything around. So we really have to beware of it.”

Lord Pickles, the UK’s special envoy on issues after Holocaust, who chaired the International Union for the Holocaust Remembrance, warned that the “distortion” threatened the Holocaust’s inheritance and historical truth.

Hearing the survivors inside the tent in Birkenaau, he told the BBC that “we saw a memory transfer in history” because now it is very unlikely that the survivors will make speeches much longer.

“It’s very discouraging and I don’t believe we’re in the Holocaust World.”

A study in eight countries, published last week, suggested that another Holocaust may happen again. Concern was particularly high in the US and the UK, according to the study of 1,000 people in each country for a claim conference.

Additional reporting from Laura Gosi in London.