King Charles and Prince William are leading the royal family’s commemorations of the victims of the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day.
However, they are not the focus. The survivors are the focus. There are not many, given the passage of time. And they are not many because the lesson of the Holocaust is not about survival. It is about murder. Surviving was not normal. Death was the norm.
The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being observed at the site of the former death camp.
It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything,” said Holocaust survivor Jona Laks, 94, about her return to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Silence pervades the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau today. Sometimes the only sounds are the soft footsteps of visitors, people who come from all over the world to mourn and to learn, and the voices of their guides speaking in hushed tones into microphones trying to explain the ungraspable.
About 50 survivors are joining King Charles and world leaders for commemorations including a service and speeches.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II.
Elderly camp survivors, some wearing striped scarves that recall their prison uniforms, walked to the the Death Wall, where prisoners were executed. Across Europe, officials were pausing to remember.
Auschwitz survivors and global leaders gathered at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation. The ceremony drew an array of international dignitaries,
Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on January 27, honours the day in 1945 when the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland was liberated by the advancing forces of the former USSR towards the end of World War II.
The day is meant for people to remember the millions of Jewish people, and people from other backgrounds, who were killed by the Nazis during WWII.