With their numbers dwindling year by year, about one hundred survivors are expected to attend ceremonies marking the anniversary of the January 27, 1945 Red Army liberation of the Nazi German camp, an enduring and stark reminder of the horror of the Holocaust.
“Soon we will no longer be able to speak face to face with survivors. Most are over 80 years old now,” said Piotr Cywinski, Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
“When the last witnesses of Nazi Germany's insane politics leave us, only the walls and ruins will be left and will have to speak for them,” said Cywinski.
Senior officials from more than 20 countries are due to attend the ceremony at the site of the camp on the outskirts of the southern Polish city of Oswiecim.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski invited his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev who declined to attend, citing “other obligations”, according to a Polish presidential statement.
The Kaddish, or Jewish prayer of mourning, is to be recited during an ecumenical ceremony at a memorial to the victims, organisers said.
Earlier, European education ministers are to gather to reflect on how to best teach youngsters the lessons of Auschwitz, almost seven decades after the end of World War II.
The inauguration of a Russian exhibition on the liberation is also scheduled at the camps museum for January 27, declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations.
Initially set up by the Nazis as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners in 1940, a year after invading Germany, it became a site primarily for murdering Jews in1942 as it expanded at nearby Birkenau to advance to the notorious gas chambers.
In addition to a million Jews from Poland and across occupied Europe, and 70-75,000 non-Jewish Poles, the camp was also used to kill 21,000 Roma, 15,000 captured Soviet soldiers and 10-15,000 others, including Resistance members arrested by the Germans across the continent, according to the museum.
The largest and deadliest Nazi German camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau is the only one to have been preserved much as it was when they fled from advancing Soviet forces, Cywinski said.
“This is why it is so urgently necessary to preserve what still remains,” he said.
The Nazis razed their other death camps in Poland like Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec to cover their tracks, but fled before they could destroy Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In 1947, two years after the war, the Polish government decided to preserve the death camp, enlisting survivors to create a museum. Warsaw has paid for its upkeep ever since.
But as time passes, the aging site is in need of ever greater maintenance.
With a record 1.3 million visitors in 2009, wear and tear is inevitable.
To preserve it, Poland has created a special fund to which Germany has already pledged half the required 120 million euros (170 million dollars).
Plans call for the entire pool of cash to be invested and for earnings to cover
maintenance works over the next 25 years.
“We want to preserve the memory of what the Nazis wanted to destroy,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and former Polish foreign minister.
But the museum is not just fighting the passage of time.
On December 18, thieves stole the infamously cynical “Arbeit Macht Frei”(“Work Will Set You Free” in German) sign from the Auschwitz entrance gate, allegedly on the order of a Swede known for neo-Nazi sympathies. Recovered by the Polish police two days later, it was returned by investigators to the museum on January 21.
But it will not be back in place by the commemoration as the thieves had cut it into three pieces and it must be restored. The museum put up a copy immediately after the theft. - AFP
