European leaders listen to Holocaust victims at Auschwitz: "I thought all Jewish children had to die"
An offering at the death wall marks the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Sprouting grass mixed with mud and remnants of snow on the unpaved sides of Auschwitz. The sun warms the body despite the cold. Eighty years ago, the extermination camp was surrounded by fog on this January 27th, and the weather made what the Red Army soldiers found upon liberating the place where 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jews, were murdered, more terrifying, a symbol of the Holocaust and where the Final Solution was materialized. Eight decades later, this Monday has been a day of mourning and remembrance at Auschwitz.
At nine in the morning, about fifty survivors with their families gathered at the death wall of the concentration camp. Clad in the blue and white striped scarf reminiscent of the uniform they wore in the camp, the victims of Nazism - all over 80 years old - placed candles and a floral offering at the death wall.
It is a concrete wall still bearing notches from bullets. A wall less than five meters long where prisoners were lined up to be executed with a gunshot. A method that proved ineffective for Hitler and his accomplices, as it was expensive and sometimes disturbed the executioners. This method of murder was replaced by killings with Zyklon B gas in Block 11 of the concentration camp.
The offering at the death wall is a tradition every five years, and the survivors are always accompanied by the President of Poland, who dedicates a few words to them. This Monday, Andrzej Duda recalled that it has been two decades since the United Nations established the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust. "As we well know, the concentration camps and, above all, the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Birkenau in particular, were built to carry out the extermination of the Jewish nation," he recalled in a speech in which he did not shy away from being harsh about what happened.
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