75 YEARS ON... NEVER FORGET HORROR OF HOLOCAUST
DEATH CAMP VICTIMS REMEMBERED
THE Duchess of Cornwall placed a candle for Holocaust victims at Auschwitz yesterday on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Heading a British delegation that included two Jewish women who survived the genocide, Camilla joined world leaders and some 200 survivors for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the icy cold at AuschwitzBirkenau camp in the Polish town of Oswiecim, they honoured the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust – and others including Roma people, homosexuals and political prisoners – who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
The vast camp where 1.1 million prisoners, including 960,000 Jews, were murdered, most in the gas chambers, was liberated by Russian troops on January 27, 1945.
Tears flowed as survivors returned to remember dead friends and family, and to remind the world of the horrors of state-sponsored racist murder.All gathered in a giant tent erected above the Gate of Death where trains crammed with Jews arrived at the camp. Later they walked down the track beside preserved watch-towers, razor wire fences, and camp buildings to place candles where prisoners were divided between those fit for slave labour and the rest sent to their deaths in the gas chambers.
It was her biggest solo engagement overseas for Camilla – whose father was taken prisoner fighting Rommel’s Afrika Corps at El Alamein – since she married Prince Charles in 2005.
She was joined by Renee Salt, 90, who was held for several weeks in Auschwitz, and Hannah Lewis, 82, another British woman who was held in camps after watching Nazi troops execute her mother.
Britain announced that it was donating £1million of taxpayers’ money to help preserve AuschwitzBirkenau so that future generations are aware of the atrocity.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, hailed the survivors for bearing painful testimony.
“While they have a breath in their bodies, they will tell others what happened,” she said.
And with anti-Semitism on the rise again in Britain and around the world, she called for a redoubling of efforts to combat racist hate.
“It had to be a warning sign for the future,” she said. “I never thought when I started this work that I would have spent the past three years calling out antiSemitism in mainstream politics.
“I didn’t expect to witness attacks on synagogues in Halle in Germany or in Pittsburgh.
“I don’t think any of the survivors thought they would witness what they have witnessed in their lifetime and it’s for their sake that we need to do better.”
Among survivors to speak was Else Baker, a British woman sent to Auschwitz at the age of eight because her mother was a Romany. Else said: “In times like this when minorities have to feel vulnerable again, I can only hope that everyone would stand up for democracy and human rights.”
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said: “In 2020 we hear the same lies the Nazis used so effectively in propaganda.We will never eradicate antiSemitism, it is a deadly virus that has been with us over 2,000 years, but we cannot look the other way and pretend it’s not happening.
“That’s what people did throughout the 1930s and that’s what led to Auschwitz.”