Last survivors recall Auschwitz, ask if lessons learnt
Nightmares and flashbacks on Auschwitz return
Holocaust survivor Mordechai Ronen is overcome by emotions standing next to the President of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder (R) as he arrives at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim on January 26, 2015. PHOTO: AFP
Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, ageing survivors and dignitaries gather at the site synonymous with the Holocaust on Tuesday to honour victims and sound the alarm over a fresh wave of anti-Semitism.
On the eve of the landmark event, which is expected to draw several heads of state, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg were among those to highlight the violence against Jews in modern-day Europe.
Merkel said it was a "disgrace" that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats or violence, as she joined survivors Monday in Berlin observing 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army.
Spielberg pointed to what he termed "the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe" amid a rise in anti-Semitism on the continent underscored by the deadly attack on a Jewish Kosher grocery in Paris earlier this month.
Awarded an Oscar for the Holocaust drama "Schindler's List", Spielberg - who has also videotaped the testimony of 58,000 survivors - met with hundreds of them, mostly in their nineties, in Krakow, southern Poland.
The meeting came ahead of today's ceremonies at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau site in nearby Oswiecim.
Royals from Belgium and The Netherlands are expected to be in attendance, as are more than a dozen presidents and prime ministers from across the globe.
French President Francois Hollande, German President Joachim Gauck and Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko are to participate, but Russia, the United States and Israel have chosen to send lower-ranking representatives.
The Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz -- a former aide to Saint Pope John Paul II -- will be there on behalf of the Holy See.
Also attending is Celina Biniaz, elegant at 83, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being place on Oskar Schindler's famous list.
As a child she left death camp to work in a nearby factory run by the German industrialist.
"I so wish they would settle that problem in the Middle East because I so believe that it has a definite impact on what's happening with anti-Semitism all over Europe," said Biniaz, who came from California for the ceremonies.
"The Muslims have been disenfranchised and their young have no hope for the future, so they are desperate and it sounds glamorous for them to join things like ISIS," she said, referring to the Islamic State group that has captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.
For survivor David Wisnia, his return to Auschwitz is bringing on nightmares and flashbacks for the first time.
"It's a lifetime ago really," the 88-year-old said.
"Last night sleeping... here, I had a horrible dream and woke up and looked out the window and sort of thought that I was back in Birkenau in cell block 14 where I started in 1942," he told journalists ahead of Tuesday's ceremonies. A choir boy as a child at Warsaw's Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia will sing a memorial prayer in Hebrew on Tuesday.
"I pray to God that we as human beings are able to learn something from it," he said.
Part of Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler's genocide plan against European Jews, dubbed the "Final Solution", Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the then-occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.
Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, some 1.1 million - mainly European Jews - perished, either asphyxiated in the gas chambers or claimed by starvation, exhaustion and disease.
In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe's 11 million Jews.
On the eve of the landmark event, which is expected to draw several heads of state, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg were among those to highlight the violence against Jews in modern-day Europe.
Merkel said it was a "disgrace" that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats or violence, as she joined survivors Monday in Berlin observing 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army.
Spielberg pointed to what he termed "the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe" amid a rise in anti-Semitism on the continent underscored by the deadly attack on a Jewish Kosher grocery in Paris earlier this month.
Awarded an Oscar for the Holocaust drama "Schindler's List", Spielberg - who has also videotaped the testimony of 58,000 survivors - met with hundreds of them, mostly in their nineties, in Krakow, southern Poland.
The meeting came ahead of today's ceremonies at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau site in nearby Oswiecim.
Royals from Belgium and The Netherlands are expected to be in attendance, as are more than a dozen presidents and prime ministers from across the globe.
French President Francois Hollande, German President Joachim Gauck and Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko are to participate, but Russia, the United States and Israel have chosen to send lower-ranking representatives.
The Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz -- a former aide to Saint Pope John Paul II -- will be there on behalf of the Holy See.
Also attending is Celina Biniaz, elegant at 83, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being place on Oskar Schindler's famous list.
As a child she left death camp to work in a nearby factory run by the German industrialist.
"I so wish they would settle that problem in the Middle East because I so believe that it has a definite impact on what's happening with anti-Semitism all over Europe," said Biniaz, who came from California for the ceremonies.
"The Muslims have been disenfranchised and their young have no hope for the future, so they are desperate and it sounds glamorous for them to join things like ISIS," she said, referring to the Islamic State group that has captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.
For survivor David Wisnia, his return to Auschwitz is bringing on nightmares and flashbacks for the first time.
"It's a lifetime ago really," the 88-year-old said.
"Last night sleeping... here, I had a horrible dream and woke up and looked out the window and sort of thought that I was back in Birkenau in cell block 14 where I started in 1942," he told journalists ahead of Tuesday's ceremonies. A choir boy as a child at Warsaw's Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia will sing a memorial prayer in Hebrew on Tuesday.
"I pray to God that we as human beings are able to learn something from it," he said.
Part of Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler's genocide plan against European Jews, dubbed the "Final Solution", Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the then-occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.
Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, some 1.1 million - mainly European Jews - perished, either asphyxiated in the gas chambers or claimed by starvation, exhaustion and disease.
In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe's 11 million Jews.