Auschwitz survivors return as world remembers Nazi death camp 80 years on

About 50 survivors of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau will return to the site on Monday to remember the day it was finally liberated on January 27, 1945.

They will be joined by heads of state including King Charles and other European royals, Emmanuel Macron of France and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

But it will be the survivors – most in their late 80s and 90s – not the dignitaries whose voices will be heard during commemorations at the camp where 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were killed.

Their message is to tell the world what happened here and make sure it never happens again.

“Every soul on this earth has the right to live,” says Jonah Lax, now 94, who arrived with her twin sisters and older sisters in 1944. “Auschwitz was a laboratory for killing people. That was his task, and it proved: few survived Auschwitz.”

Although daytime temperatures have risen well above freezing in recent days and much of the snow has melted, many of the 50 arriving for Monday’s commemorations are now too weak to stay outdoors for long.

Instead, a huge heated tent has been erected over the “Door of Death”, as Birkenau’s entrance is known.

The day will begin with survivors and Polish President Andrzej Duda laying a wreath at the “Wall of Death” at the first Auschwitz camp, where thousands of Polish prisoners, Jews and Soviet prisoners of war were shot.

The scene would later move to the Birkenau death camp known as Auschwitz II.

Every major anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops is different. There was much less international interest 30 years ago, as the famous writer Elie Wiesel led a large group of survivors and relatives to one of the crematoriums blown up by the Nazis before escaping.

German historian Susanne Willems spoke fondly of the survivors she met over several decades: “Many were like beloved grandfathers to me. Of course we have lost many of them and it is my duty to go on and bear witness to them.”

There will be no political speeches by international leaders at the Gate of Death and no Russian presence due to the full-scale war launched against Ukraine almost three years ago, although the camp was liberated by the Russian-dominated 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front.

Vladimir Putin attended the 60th anniversary; he is not welcome now.

The Nazi decision to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe in extermination camps took effect in early 1942. Six were built in occupied Poland: in Chelmno, Belzek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Treblinka was much smaller than Auschwitz and yet 800,000-850,000 Jews were killed there in a much shorter period.

Heinrich Himmler, supreme commander of the dreaded SS, and camp commandant Rudolf Höss lead the expansion of the Auschwitz complex to build a second Birkenau industrial killing camp.

By the end of 1942 there are four separate gas chambers and crematoria.

The first mass deportations of Jews to Birkenau came from Slovakia and France in March 1942, and then in July also from Holland and Belgium, walking under this sign and continuing to their deaths.

Trains would soon arrive at Birkenau on a purpose-built ramp, a short distance from two gas chambers, and at one point 12,000 Jews were being gassed and their bodies burned each day.

Jonah Lax had already lost his parents in Helmo and arrived in 1944. with his twin sister Miriam and older sister Hannah from the Lodz Ghetto in the north.

“I was ordered to go to the left, which meant the crematorium, while my twin was sent to the right. It was just because the guy was so bored he was saying ‘Left, right, left, right’ without even looking at the people, which I didn’t know meant death, but I knew it wasn’t good,” she told the BBC .

Eighty to 90% of the new arrivals were sent to their deaths, while others were selected for slave labor. “I was now very near the gate; I could see the sparks, the fire coming out of the chimneys, and I could even smell burnt flesh.”

Jonah Lax was only saved because her older sister cried out that she should not be separated from her twin, and word reached the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” at the Josef Mengele camp, who used part of Birkenau for often deadly medical experiments on twins .

Women and children, the elderly and the infirm were immediately sent to the gas chambers. My own grandfather, on the first Dutch transport, experienced slave labor for a month and a day, until August 18, 1942.

His sister Gerte van Hasselt, her husband Simon, the headmaster of the school, and their two daughters Hermi, 14, and nine-year-old Sophia, were killed on arrival on 12 February 1943.

Almost a million European Jews were killed here from 1941 to 1945. But among the dead were also about 70,000 Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, as well as an unknown number of gays.

Auschwitz attracted 1.83 million visitors last year, and despite being closed for the commemoration, large numbers of people strolled through the museum, set in many of the old blocks across Auschwitz 1 over the weekend, and then into the desolate, sprawling site of Birkenau.

The scale of the site is frightening. The remains of many of the blocks have been chipped away, with brick foundations all that remain as you peer into the distance. But the ruins of two gas chambers and crematoria remain, blown up as the Nazis tried to destroy the evidence.

“It makes you feel anxious when you’re here. You don’t realize how sad it is until you see it,” said a young woman with a group of friends from Lancashire, all 18.

“Obviously you learn about it, but it’s crazy when you see it in real life,” said another. “It’s crazy to think that some people don’t think it exists.”

Far-right parties have made big gains in several European countries, not least in Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is second in opinion polls ahead of next month’s election.

Historian Suzanne Willems, who has been leading groups at Auschwitz for years, took a group of Berlin policemen to Auschwitz last week to explain the rise of Nazism and how any military type of hierarchy risks devolving into authoritarianism.

“I do this work to help these people clearly understand what the limits of police action should be and that whatever they are asked to do is their own decision whether to obey or not; and that they have the right, indeed the duty, to refuse anything which they think is against human rights.”

Among those not in Poland for the commemoration is Italy’s best-known living Auschwitz survivor, 94-year-old Liliana Segre, who will instead take part in events in Rome.

A lifelong senator, Segre has been given police protection amid a barrage of anti-Semitic abuse that reached a new level on social media after a documentary about her life was released this month.

Her father and grandparents were killed in Birkenau, but like Jonah Lax, she survived as a teenager the Nazis’ death march to Malchow near the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

“(Segre) often tells me, ‘I’m sick of the insults,'” says the director of the Milan Holocaust Memorial, Roberto Jarach.