Ceremonies honour Holocaust survivors

Resurgence of anti-Semitism casting a shadow over a new generation of European Jews

WARSAW, POLAND— Dozens of elderly Holocaust survivors lit candles at Auschwitz on Wednesday, exactly 71 years after the Soviet army liberated the death camp that has become the most powerful symbol of the human suffering inflicted by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The commemoration at the former death camp in southern Poland, an area under Nazi occupation during the war, is part of the UN-designated International Remembrance Day, marked by politicians, survivors and others in ceremonies and events across the world.

At Auschwitz, some of the survivors wore sashes or scarves that recalled the striped pyjama-style clothing prisoners were forced to wear. They placed candles and wreaths at a wall where many prisoners were executed before gathering with the presidents of Poland and Croatia for official ceremonies.

The Nazis killed more than one million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Roma, non-Jewish Poles and others.

This year’s commemorations come as a resurgence of anti-Semitism casts a shadow over a new generation of European Jews, something that is driving thousands of them each year to leave the continent.

“We must be honest enough to admit that more than 70 years after the Shoah, anti-Semitism is still alive in our ‘civilized’ European Union,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s top foreign affairs representative, said in a statement.

In Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees have arrived in the past year, Jews feel threatened from both the far right and people coming from countries such as Syria. At a ceremony Wednesday morning at the United Nations, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke out against a “rising tide of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and other forms of discrimination” around the world, and he used the occasion to once again call for all parties in Syria’s conflict to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid to millions.

“Starvation as a weapon of war and the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime,” he said.

CZAREK SOKOLOWSKI/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Soldiers hold a wreath at the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland on International Remembrance Day, which marks liberation of the camp.