BERLIN — World leaders and dozens of Holocaust survivors gathered Monday at the former site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops at the end of World War II. The ceremony is regarded as the likely last major observance of Auschwitz's liberation that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend, due to their advanced ages.
Among those who traveled to the site was 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was 6 years old when she was among the 7,000 people liberated from Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. She flew to Poland this month from her home in New Jersey.
"The world has become toxic," Friedman told the Associated Press. "I realize that we're in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don't stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction."
Nazi German forces murdered more than 1 million people at Auschwitz, a Nazi-run death camp built in a region of southern Poland under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews, killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers. Germany's Nazi regime also targeted Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and disabled people for elimination.
For Monday's commemoration in Oswiecim, Poland, the U.S. sent a delegation led by Steve Witkoff, President Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, who played a key role in negotiating this month's Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas. Howard Lutnick, Trump's pick for secretary of commerce, also was present, as was Charles Kushner, father of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump's choice as ambassador to France.
Dozens of other leaders and dignitaries attended Monday's ceremony, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Britain's King Charles III and French President Emmanuel Macron, but all were asked by organizers not to speak at the ceremony. Instead, they were requested to listen and observe as they toured the Auschwitz grounds, which now operates as a memorial site whose goal is to inform visitors about the atrocities that happened at the site.
Prior to the ceremony, Poland's President Andrzej Duda remembered the victims of the camp in a television address, saying his country has a special role in preserving the memory of Auschwitz. "We Poles, on whose land occupied by Nazi Germany the Germans built this extermination industry and concentration camp," said Duda, "are today the guardians of memory."
At the ceremony on the former grounds of Auschwitz, Duda, accompanied by survivors, laid a wreath at the so-called "Death Wall," where shooting executions took place. Some of the survivors wore blue-and-white striped scarves, the colors of the prisoner uniforms they were forced to wear at the camp.
In several interviews with German media, Chancellor Olaf Scholz commented that it was "depressing how many people in Germany hardly know anything about the Holocaust." Each state in Germany has control over how the Holocaust is taught in schools, and instruction is inconsistent.
His comments came days after billionaire Elon Musk joined via video link a political rally organized by the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, telling thousands of party supporters that Germany places too much emphasis on "past guilt."
"Children should not be held responsible for the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents," Musk said to cheers.
A day after the political rally, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote in a post on X that calls at the rally "about 'Great Germany' and 'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
In an appearance on Germany's public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Abraham Lehrer, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the horrors Nazi Germany perpetuated at Auschwitz: "We must not allow commemoration to be 'enough.' "
Copyright 2025 NPR
