Auschwitz survivors pay homage as world remembers Holocaust

WARSAW (AP):

The world marked Inter­national Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday amid a revival of hate-inspired violence and signs that younger generations know less and less about the genocide of Jews, Roma, and others by Nazi Germany during World War II.

As survivors of Auschwitz marked the 74th anniversary of the notorious death camp’s liberation, a far-right activist who served time in prison for burning an effigy of a Jew placed a wreath there with about 50 other Polish nationalists to protest the official observances.

Piotr Rybak said the group opposes the annual ceremony at Auschwitz to mark the camp’s liberation by the Soviet army, the event that gave rise to the international January 27 remembrance. Rybak claimed that it glorifies the one million Jewish victims killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death complex and discounts the 70,000 Poles killed there.

“It’s time to fight against Jewry and free Poland from them!” Rybak said as he marched to the site, ­according to a report by Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on its website.

Rybak’s claim is incorrect. The ceremony at the state-run memorial site paid homage on Sunday, as it does every year, to all of the camp’s victims, both Jews and ­gentiles, while Christian and Jewish religious leaders recited a prayer in unison. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also stressed that the Third Reich ­targeted Poles as well as Jews.

DEADLY ATTACK

Since last year’s observances, an 85-year-old French Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, was ­fatally stabbed in Paris and 11 Jews were gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue during Shabbat ­services, the deadliest attack on Jews in US history.

Human Rights First, a US ­organisation, recalled those ­killings and warned that “today’s threats do not come solely from the fringe”.

“In places such as Hungary and Poland, once proudly democratic nations, government leaders are travelling the road to authoritarianism,” said Ira Forman, the group’s senior adviser for combating ­anti-Semitism. “As they do so, they are distorting history to spin a fable about their nations and the Holocaust.”

Former Auschwitz prisoners placed flowers early on Sunday at an execution wall at Auschwitz, paying homage before the arrival of the nationalists at the same spot. They wore striped scarves that recalled their uniforms, some with the red letter ‘P’, the symbol the Germans used to mark them as Poles.

Early in World War II, most prisoners were Poles, rounded up by the occupying German forces. Later, Auschwitz was transformed into a mass killing site for Jews, Roma, and others, operating until the liberation by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.

In Germany, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned in an op-ed in the weekly Welt am Sonntag that across Europe populists are propagating nationalism and “far-right provocateurs are trying to downplay the Holocaust.”

“We shall never forget. We shall never be indifferent. We must stand up for our liberal democracy,” Maas wrote.

Over the past year, Germany has seen a rising number of often ­violent attacks against Jews carried out by neo-Nazis and Muslims, prompting the government to appoint a commissioner against anti-Semitism and to start funding a national registration office for anti-Semitic hate crimes.

The appearance by nationalists at Auschwitz comes amid a surge of right-wing extremism in Poland and elsewhere in the West. It is fed by a broader grievance many Poles have that their suffering during the war at German hands is little known abroad while there is greater knowledge of the Jewish tragedy.

However, recent surveys show that knowledge of the atrocities during World War II is declining generally.