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Death Camp Survivors Mark Auschwitz Anniversary

   VOA News 27 January 2010

Photo: AP

   Rabbi  Israel  Meir  Lau (l) Auschwitz survivor Michael Goldman-Gilad,
   second  left,  Polish  President  Lech  Kaczynski  and  Israeli  Prime
   Minister  Benjamin  Netanyahu, (r) attend solemn ceremonies marking 65
   years since the camp was liberated by the Red Army, in the former Nazi
   death camp Auschwitz/ Birkenau, 27 Jan. 2010

   Auschwitz survivors, military veterans and world leaders are in Poland
   marking the 65th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the notorious
   World War II Nazi death camp.
   Ahead  of  commemoration ceremonies Wednesday, scores of elderly death
   camp survivors - some dressed in wartime prison garb - gathered in the
   snow  at  Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps in southern Poland
   preserved as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust.
   Israeli  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined Polish leaders later
   Wednesday for memorial services at Birkenau.
   The  tributes  are  part  of worldwide events on Holocaust Remembrance
   Day, established by the United Nations in 2005.
   In  Berlin, Israeli President Shimon Peres issued an emotional plea to
   bring the remaining Nazi perpetrators to justice.  Speaking in Hebrew,
   he  told the German parliament that perpetrators "still live on German
   and European soil and in other parts of the world."
   The  86-year-old  president  also spoke of his last encounter with his
   grandfather, who placed him on a train as an 11-year-old to escape the
   horrors  of  the  Nazis.  The president's grandfather was later forced
   into  a  synagogue  in  modern-day  Belarus, alongside the rest of the
   Jewish  population of his village.  The building was then set on fire.
   There were no survivors.
   Elsewhere  Wednesday,  U.S. President Barack Obama called Auschwitz "a
   place of remembrance and learning for the world."  In a video message,
   Mr.  Obama  also  said  the  world  has "a sacred duty to remember the
   cruelty"  that  occurred  at  Auschwitz and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied
   Europe during the war.
   German-born  Pope  Benedict  spoke  at  the  Vatican of the horror and
   "unheard of brutality committed in the death camps."  He said he hoped
   the  memory  of  those events "induce respect for the dignity of every
   person.
   The  Nazis  opened  Auschwitz  as  a concentration camp in 1940, after
   invading and occupying Poland.  The Nazis later turned the camp into a
   center  for the German plan to kill Europe's Jews.  By 1945, more than
   one  million  prisoners - most of them Jews - died in the gas chambers
   of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

   Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

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