Auschwitz survivors remember

BRZEZINKA, Poland — Snowflakes swirled around the crematoriums and barbed wire of Auschwitz, and a shrill train whistle pierced the silence as frail survivors and humbled world leaders remembered the victims of the Holocaust yesterday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.

Candles flickered in the darkening winter gloom of the sprawling site, which Israeli President Moshe Katsav called "the capital of the kingdom of death."

During World War II, an estimated 1.5 million people — mostly Jews — were killed at the site. Others who perished there included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

The haunting commemoration was held at the place where new arrivals stumbled out of cattle cars and were met by Nazi doctors who chose a few to be worked to death while the rest were sent immediately to gas chambers. Others died of starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.

"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," Katsav said. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."

French parliamentarian Simone Veil, who was imprisoned here as a 17-year-old, pondered the children who didn't survive, among them her sister.

"What would have become of them, these millions of Jewish children ... murdered here or in the ghettos or in other death camps? Would they have become philosophers? Artists? Great scientists? Or perhaps just skilled craftsmen or mothers of families? All I know is that I weep whenever I think of them," she said.

Many of the survivors displayed their inmate numbers on their clothing or wore the rough striped caps that were issued to prisoners. Some wore the red triangle patches that the Nazis issued to Polish political prisoners to distinguish them from Jews.

As the generation of survivors gradually dies off, yesterday's commemoration took on added meaning.

"In my life I have attended hundreds of regional and international ceremonies, but I do not think there will be another similar to this one," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish underground fighter, prisoner No. 4427 at Auschwitz, and later Poland's foreign minister.

"The question to be asked of ourselves and the world is: How much of the truth about those horrible experiences of totalitarianism have we managed to pass down to younger generations? Much of it, I believe, but not enough," Bartoszewski said.

As night fell and the ceremony ended with a locomotive whistle blaring over loudspeakers, a half-mile of train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematoriums were set ablaze in a pyrotechnic display — two flaming rails amid the snow.

The 30 leaders, including Vice President Dick Cheney and presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France, placed candles shielded in blue lanterns on a low stone memorial. Soldiers of a Polish honor guard stood stiffly in the freezing wind. New Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko gently set down his candle and made the sign of the cross.

Germany's President Horst Koehler placed a candle but didn't speak, in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's attempt to wipe out Europe's Jews. In all, some 6 million Jews died in Hitler's network of camps, while several million non-Jews also perished.

JANEK SKARZYNSKI / AFP/GETTY IMAGES A half-mile of train tracks leading from the front gate of the Auschwitz death camp to the crematoriums were set ablaze yesterday in a pyrotechnic display — two flaming rails amid the snow.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau — the occupiers' names for Polish Oswiecim and Brzezinka — on Jan. 27, 1945.

At the ceremony, young girls brought blankets to survivors sitting in the cold.

Auschwitz survivor Gabi Neumann, 68, traveled from his home in Israel and held up a poster that bore the words, "Stop it before it happens again" and the yellow stars of the European Union flag distorted to resemble a swastika.

"I made this poster because anti-Semitism is a big problem in Europe," said Neumann, who was an 8-year-old when he was freed from the camp. Originally from Slovakia, he lost a grandmother at Auschwitz.

"But she has no grave," he said. "I am happy there is snow here because it keeps me from standing on her ashes."

Putin compared the Nazis to modern terrorists.

"Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."

Earlier in Krakow, Cheney noted that the Holocaust did not happen in some far-off place but "in the heart of the civilized world."

"The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," he said.

People at the ceremony expressed concern over recent incidents such as a walkout from an Auschwitz commemoration by far-right local legislators in Germany, and a statement from far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who minimized the brutality of Nazi rule during the occupation by German troops. He said it "was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders."