Survivors call for end to world indifference at Auschwitz memorial
Survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, have warned the world against indifference to hatred, at a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet army.
More than 200 survivors of the camp were among more than 3,000 who gathered in a huge purpose-built tent enveloping the notorious “Gate of Death” where prisoners were brought into the camp in southern Poland by cattle car, selected into lines of those who would live and die, and where most were murdered almost immediately in gas chambers.
The focus of the commemoration – attended by dignitaries from around the world, including royalty, presidents and ambassadors – was on the survivors, most in their late 80s to mid-90s, who talked movingly of their own tales of endurance and hope, of the despair of losing loved ones, as well as their sense of incredulity still to this day at the efficiency of the Nazi state-sanctioned killing machine, to which the rest of the world appeared largely indifferent and that murdered approximately 1.1 million mostly Jews in Auschwitz alone.
A total of 6 million Jews were slaughtered, 1.5 million of them children, in the Holocaust – of which Auschwitz has become the dominant and enduring symbol.
Marian Turski, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 18 because he was Jewish, urged the world to adopt an 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not be indifferent,” a reference to the late Nobel writer and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, who wrote: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
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