The afternoon of January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers opened the gates to Auschwitz.
The sight that met them shocked the entire world: Thousands of starving people in blue-and-white-striped prisoner uniforms, hundreds of prisoners who had recently died or been executed by fleeing SS soldiers.
Tova Friedman was six years old that day. 80 years later, she sees how hate and anti-Semitism are gaining ground again.
The world has become toxic. I realize that we are in a crisis again, that there is so much hate and mistrust everywhere, she says to AP and continues:
A new terrible Holocaust can become a reality.
Wearing blue and white stripes
Today, politicians, royals, and other dignitaries gather in Oswiecim, the Polish name for the Nazi-called Auschwitz. From Sweden, Crown Princess Victoria and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, among others, are attending. But the focus is on the 50 survivors who have returned to Auschwitz.
Some of them wear hats and scarves with blue and white stripes. At the so-called death wall, where thousands of prisoners were executed, they laid wreaths and lit candles on Monday morning to commemorate all those who were killed at the site.
No Russian delegation has been invited, despite the fact that the soldiers who liberated the camp were Russian and Ukrainian soldiers from the Bolshevik Red Army.
Zelenskyj on site
"We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldiers who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory," says Russian President Vladimir Putin in a statement on Monday, according to the Kremlin.
The world must unite against evil, emphasizes Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyj, who is present in Poland for today's event. The memory of the Holocaust is fading, he warns in a statement.
"We must overcome the hatred that leads to abuse and murder. We must prevent forgetfulness," says Zelenskyj.
During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's mass murder between 1939-1945, approximately six million Jews were killed, according to the UN. About half of them were gassed to death, the rest were shot, starved, or froze to death. Also, four to five million non-Jews – including political opponents, Poles, Russians, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and the mentally ill – were murdered by the Nazis.
The majority of the victims were claimed during the years 1941-1945, after Germany's pact with the Soviet Union broke and the two countries went to war, with the period from February 1942 to April 1943 as the peak.
In Auschwitz, the German name for the city of Oswiecim in southern Poland, the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp was built during World War II. In January 1945, there were approximately 730 concentration camps and satellite camps in various forms.
Source: National Encyclopedia
