On the occasion of the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on 27 January 2015, more than 100 Auschwitz survivors from at least 17 countries will travel to Poland to participate in a commemoration event of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.
The commemoration will take place in front of the infamous Death Gate at Birkenau.
At least 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered in Auschwitz within less than five years.
The ceremony, to be attended by official delegations from countries from around the world, will be under the high patronage of Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski.
The official event will be organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Auschwitz Council with the support of the World Jewish Congress and the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.
“This anniversary is crucial because it may be the last major one marked by survivors. We are truly honored that so many of them, despite their age, have agreed to make this trip,” said World Jewish Congress President, Ronald S. Lauder.
“Few moments in the drama that was World War II are more etched in our collective memory then the day Red Army troops came upon, perhaps, the greatest evil of our time,” he said.
“On this special day we want to show the survivors and the whole world that we, the post-war generation, have matured to our own responsibility for remembrance,” Marek Zając, secretary of the International Auschwitz Council, declared.
With the help of archivists from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, USC Shoah Foundation has identified the children from an historic photo taken by Red Army photographer Alexander Vorontsov who in 1945 documented the liberation of the death camp. The surviving children are now between the ages of 81 and 86 and have been also invited to participate in the official commemoration.
“Faced as we are with the loss of living witnesses,” said Stephen Smith, USC Shoah Foundation executive director, “it is imperative we honor them and take their stories with us into the future so those who come after us will have no excuse to let such atrocities happen again. Survivors speak not only for themselves, but for the millions whose voices were violently silenced.”