Today marks 75 years since Soviet troops moved into the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp Poland to liberate the remaining prisoners there all than a million people were murdered at the camp most of them Jews all victims of execution the camps gas chambers or from starvation cold and disease .today marked international Holocaust Memorial day and survivors had been laying wreaths in a somber start to the commemorations. They will be joined at the camp by world leaders later today.
The day has also been marked by an apology from the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the country’s failure to protect Dutch Jews during the Second World war but Mark Rutte said that although some Dutch officials resisted during the Nazi occupation too many just did as they were told. For those who did survive the Holocaust today is all about remembrance.
What they endured is difficult to describe harder still to imagine, the survivors of Auschwitz preparing last night to commemorate the anniversary of its liberation. As Auschwitz Survivor Leah Cik Roth Recalled:” I heard their crying and screaming, and those screams goes with me all the way to this day.”
It’s 75 years since Russian soldiers flung open the gates of Auschwitz and the world recoiled in horror The Nazis killed more than a million people here. Many systematically gassed to death in the purpose built chambers as part of a plan to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population. Those who survived had been starved, terrorized, and tortured. Another Survivor Miriam Ziegler, just a child at the time, had been a victim of the camps’ notoriously sadistic doctor Josef Mengele. Remembering that She, as well as the other children, had taken part in the doctor’s experiments. She stated, “I was just lucky I live.”
This 75th anniversary is very poignant as inevitably, the number of victims to commemorate this to pay their own witness inevitably dwindles today’s remembrance. There are about 200 survivors who are here today. There were 300 5 years ago, and 1500 15 years ago . for many of those survivors who have come here to date have taken enormous courage to go back to this place of immense suffering and horrors that they experienced many of them that they couldn’t even tell their own families For 50 years what happened to them here in this camp.
An Example is 91-year-old Benjamin lesser who came from the USA, but he went to the USA as a 15-year-old boy, he recalled taken on transport into Auschwitz-Birkenau, put in a barracks where screams could be heard all evening. He said he said that the Nazis were throwing infants into fiery pits beside the barracks where he was staying, and it took him decades to be able to talk about this.
It was 25 years ago when the first time Benjamin was ready to go and speak to schoolchildren, and he did that and that after his talk he was surrounded he said by hundreds of pupils who wanted to listen to what he had to say and he said he was like that moment you realized that it was his obligation to speak about the horrors that it happened to him and he’s going on to set up the Holocaust foundation, and he’s written a school textbook in the USA for children because he says it’s human nature to want to forget the bad times, but Auschwitz today as a museum is a memorial stands for future generations to tell people those people who perhaps don’t remember or feel that the Holocaust was exaggerated or didn’t even happen. Today’s remembrance is testament to the fact that it did happen and it happened here