Heart-rending ceremony to remember liberation of Auschwitz

A concentration camp survivor wipes his tears during a ceremony at the former death camp Auschwitz. Picture / Reuters

Braving freezing temperatures and driven snow, octogenarian survivors and world leaders gathered for a heart-rending, sometimes jarring ceremony within the most murderously efficient of all Nazi death camps.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Vice President Dick Cheney of the US, Prince Edward and President Jacques Chirac of France were among the representatives of 40 nations who attended a four-hour commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army.

Speaking yards from the rubble of the gas chambers where at least a million people died, a series of politicians and religious leaders - too many, given the weather and age of the survivors - gave solemn pledges that anti-semitism would not be tolerated and that the Holocaust would never be allowed to happen again.

The ceremony was the centrepiece of events held all over the world to remember the attempt by Nazi Germany in 1939-45 to destroy "undesirable" races, which led to the deaths of at least five million and maybe as many as six million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles and tens of thousands of gypsies.

In London, 600 Holocaust survivors attended a memorial service in Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster, joined by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, Home Secretary Charles Clarke and leading figures from the Jewish community, as well as representatives from other faiths.

Sixty of the survivors, many infirm and many wearing skull caps, lit candles to mark each year since the liberation; many were seen to be wiping away tears as they completed their task.

During the moving and sombre service, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi said the Holocaust was the "greatest crime of man against man".

He said: "We...weep for a murdered generation: the young, the old, the innocent, the million and a half children - gassed, burned and turned to ash - because they were different."

Mr Blair said there was no need to remind the survivors of the importance of the date, but younger generations might ask what relevance the commemoration has for them.

He said: "It reminds us of suffering beyond imagination, not just because of the miserable and wretched cruelty endured by the holocaust victims, but because of how it was inflicted," he said.

"It was death as an industry, not just the destruction of human life, but of human essence, done with a barbarity we can scarcely contemplate."

The most moving moment at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was an unscheduled one. An Auschwitz survivor, perhaps impatient with the formal tone of the prolonged ceremony, seized the microphone to express a bewildered anger, undiminished by six decades.

The woman, dressed in white, and wearing a Jewish star of David, said: "I was a number. Why? Why did they burn my nation? It will never happen again. I stood here naked in this camp as a 16-year-old girl...I am standing here again..." Her voice trailed away in the swirling snow.

Over 300 Auschwitz survivors - mostly in their 80s - attended the ceremony, held beside the international memorial constructed between the ruins of Crematorium Two and Crematorium Three in the Birkenau camp.

These were the most advanced and effective combined gas chambers and crematoria - linked by a lift to remove the bodies - built by the Nazis in 1944 and destroyed just before the Russians arrived in January 1945.

The survivors, probably gathering in such large numbers for the last time, wore furs and blankets to keep out the Polish winter. Many, however, also wore the thin, blue and grey skull caps worn by Auschwitz inmates.

To symbolise the burning of the bodies of the 1,000,000 who died in Auschwitz- some historians say that it may have been as many as 1,500,000 - the Polish organisers had constructed a line of open, metal towers containing a stack of braziers. White lanterns shone along the half-mile railway siding within the camp.

It was here that an estimated 400,000 Hungarian Jews, and scores of thousands from other European nations, arrived to be instantly sorted by SS doctors and guards.

The ceremony began with a recording of a steam train arriving at a station, and the doors being flung open. At the sound, many survivors bowed their heads.

When a train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, children, mothers and anyone infirm or over the age of 35 - the vast majority - were taken immediately to the gas chambers. The remainder were stripped, shaved, tattooed with a number and forced to labour in the camp and surrounding SS-run factories.

Simone Veil, the former French health minister, who was brought by train to Auschwitz from Drancy, north of Paris, at the age of 16 in 1943, told the ceremony: "I still cry each time I think of all the children...I will never be able to forget the children."

Pope John Paul II sent a message in which he said that the world should dwell on the many heroic deeds performed at Auschwitz as well as the evil which was perpetrated there.

"Evil itself will never have the last word," he said. "Even in the very depths of suffering, love with triumph."

The two most jarring notes were struck by the Russian president, Mr Putin and the Israeli president, Moshe Katsov. Mr Putin, who was a guest of honour to mark the role of the Red Army in liberating the camp, drew prolonged applause when he said that he would try to stamp out the signs of reviving anti-semitism in Russia.

He went on, however, to implicitly compare the battle against Nazism with his uncompromising approach to the Russian-Chechnyan civil war.

"Terrorism, like fascism, is a sly, dangerous enemy," he said. "Just as there cannot be good and bad fascists, there cannot be good and bad terrorists."

Mr Katsav, the Israeli president, recalled the complicity of the administrations of many European countries occupied by the Germans in the deportation of Jews to the death camps in Poland.

More controversially, he went on to suggest that the allied governments knew about the mass murder of Jews from 1942 and could have done more to save many thousands of lives by bombing the camps or the railway lines leading to them.

Instead, he said, the allies "chose to do nothing".

This reading of events is far from accepted by all historians, even Jewish historians.

The ceremony ended in the freezing twilight. Politicians came forward one by one to place candles on the monument to the 1,000,000 Auschwitz dead. The Auschwitz living, by now shivering with the cold, gradually melted away.

- THE INDEPENDENT