Holocaust marked amid rising hatred

WARSAW, Poland — Elderly Holocaust survivors wearing striped scarves that recalled their uniforms as prisoners of Nazi Germany made a yearly pilgrimage to Auschwitz on Saturday, 73 years after the Soviet army liberated the death camp in occupied Poland.

On the date now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, political leaders and Jewish officials warned that the Nazi genocide must never cease to be a reminder of the evil of which humans are capable.

In Warsaw, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attended a solemn ceremony at a memorial to Jews who died fighting the German forces in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

Tillerson trailed two Polish military officers and readjusted a wreath underneath the monument, a hulking structure located in what was once the Warsaw Ghetto. The head of Warsaw’s Jewish community read a prayer, and Tillerson made brief remarks about the importance of not forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust. “On this occasion, it reminds us that we can never, we can never, be indifferent to the face of evil,” he said.

His words came amid signs in Europe and beyond that ultranationalism and extreme right-wing groups are on the rise.

In Germany and Austria, nations that perpetrated the killing of 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II, far-right parties with their roots in the Nazi era are rising.

In Europe, the outspoken white nationalism is seen as partially a backlash to a large influx of mostly Muslim migrants that peaked in 2015. Some of those migrants have brought their own brand of anti-Semitism with them.