TRANSCRIPT
It was the Nazi's largest death camp, located in southern Poland.
Between 1941 and 1945, some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were systematically murdered there.
Other groups targeted in the Holocaust included people with disabilities, the Roma community, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Men, women, children and the elderly suffered unimaginable horrors at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Barbaric medical experimentation on prisoners was commonplace, as was starvation and extermination by cyanide gas.
Tova Friedman was there.
A child at the time, she remembers seeing children her age being marched to their deaths.
"On an icy, windy day, I stood and watched helplessly as little girls from the nearby barrack were marched away, crying and shivering to the gas chamber. They were covered with rags and some of them didn't even have any shoes and were walking barefoot in the snow. They were very young as I was, 6 or 7. But starvation shrunk their bodies and they appeared even younger. They, too, became ashes."
Ms Friedman, 86, spoke at a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by Soviet troops on the 27th January 1945.
The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews, wiping out two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population and a third of Jews worldwide.
In 2005, the UN designated 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Among those gathered for International Holocaust Remembrance Day were 50 Auschwitz survivors and global leaders, including King Charles, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Israel, established in the wake of the Holocaust, was represented by Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
The leaders listened to survivors' testimonies rather than giving speeches.
s Friedman recalled the 1940s as a "moral vacuum" for Jews and warned of a significant rise in antisemitism.
"80 years after liberation the world is again in crisis. Our Jewish Christian values have been overshadowed worldwide by prejudice, fear, suspicion and extremism and the rampant, antisemitism that is spreading among the nations is shocking. It's shocking to all of us, to our children and our grandchildren."
99-year-old Auschwitz survivor Leon Weintraub says he is also deeply concerned to see a rise in antisemitism in many European countries - and is urging people to stand against hatred.
"Be attentive and be vigilant. We, the survivors, we understand that the consequences of being considered different is active persecution, the effects of which we have personally experienced on our own skin. So let us be very serious and let us take seriously what the enemies of democracy preach, they generally seek to implement these slogans they promote."
At the United Nations in New York, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also warned of rising antisemitism around the world, fuelled by the Israel-Hamas conflict which has resulted in the deaths of over 46,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
“Today our world is fractured and dangerous. Eighty years since the Holocaust’s end, antisemitism is still with us, fueled by the same lies and loathing that made the Nazi genocide possible. And it is rising. Discrimination is rife, hatred is being stirred up across the globe. One of the clearest and most troubling examples is the spreading cancer of Holocaust denial: undisputable historical facts are being distorted, diminished and dismissed. And efforts are being made to recast and rehabilitate the Nazis and their collaborators. We must stand up to these outrages.”
Israel's President Isaac Herzog was also at the United Nations where he spoke of the world experiencing what he calls a huge volcano of antisemitism erupt since the 7th of October 2023 Hamas attack which saw mostly 1,200 Israelis killed and some 250 taken hostage.
“I want to be clear: we know for a fact, based on evidence, that the October 7th terrorists drew inspiration from Hitler and the Nazis and acted with all their cruelty to destroy our nation of Israel and its citizens. But the issue, ladies and gentlemen, is much deeper and reaches far beyond the October 7th massacre. We have all witnessed a huge volcano of antisemitism erupt following the massacre. This alarming reality was also reflected in the important report the United Nations just published about antisemitism.”
In Israel, a survivor of the 7th October 2023 Hamas attack on the Nova music festival joined elderly Holocaust survivors for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The ceremony, held in Haifa in northern Israel, featured 27-year-old Naama Gal, who says she felt like a survivor of another Holocaust, and called for the return of her friends, among the 90 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
"It's very exciting to be here with other Holocaust survivors because I've been through another Holocaust, and we are very strong. And nobody will beat us. Never. ... I will add that we need to bring them home as soon as possible. I have a lot of friends that are still kidnaped in Gaza. And this is the most important thing that we need to do now. We are strong and we will pass (go through) it. And I hope that it will never happen again to my children because we can see here a lot of generations that past (been through) another kind of holocaust and and it's very important that it will not happen again."
