At every turn of this sprawling, desolate prison, death stares you in the face.
Auschwitz did not just fall from the sky. It was a plan hatched by history’s most wicked minds, a network of extermination camps built as part of what the Nazis chillingly described as the “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem.
Unrivalled in its depravity, the killing complex in what was occupied Poland was the scene of industrialised execution.
During the Second World War the Nazis, their allies and collaborators murdered six million Jewish people, 90 per cent of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, in a systematic and state-sponsored genocide known as the Holocaust.
And everywhere in this bleak wasteland lurks a window into the minds of evil beyond understanding.
Mounds of human hair, mountains of shoes, piles of clothes, and leather suitcases with neatly-written name tags, serve to remind that all who entered here were stripped of their dignity, stripped of their clothes, and finally stripped of all hope.
As the decades pass the number who are able, willingly, to pass through the gates of hell might be dwindling, but their purpose remains more important than ever.
Inside the pristinely-preserved brick and wooden blocks, along its wind-whipped corridors, and behind electrified barbed-wire fences, the voices of those who perished inside still scream but cannot be heard.
Exactly 80 years after its liberation by Soviet forces on November 27, 1945, and among the ghosts of entire generations lost to state-sponsored slaughter, stood those who survived.
On Holocaust Memorial Day there was courage and hope as they spoke to remember those who were lost to evil and honour their memories. Their mere presence at Europe’s warehouse of death was one of humanity’s greatest acts of defiance.
Holocaust survivor Stanislaw pays his respects at a service held at the death camp (Image: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock)
Marian Turski, 98, who was 14 when he was forced into the Lodz Ghetto with his family, walked to the stage with the aid of two sticks to address “my fellow men and women who have shared this misery with me, the inmates”.
In an address that moved many to tears he said: “There is a very small minority of us who went through all those selections, those who lived to see freedom, there were hardly none.
“So few and now there are only a handful. That is why I believe that our thoughts should now go towards this huge majority, those millions of victims who will never tell us what they experienced, that they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction.”
Janina Iwanska, 94, described how Auschwitz-Birkenau changed in 1942 from a camp for political prisoners to a ruthless death factory.
She said: “The operators of the camp started building gas chambers and the crematorium. This is when the killing machine started its operation. It is difficult to calculate all the people killed here.”
In August 1943, as many as 4,000 Romani people were living there and Janina said: “There was this night where they were all taken to the gas chambers. The next day not a single Roma was living there.”
Polish-born Briton Mala Tribich, 94, was present at the commemoration service alongside King Charles, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and world leaders.
In the five-and-a-half years after the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, when she was just eight, she lost her parents, Sara and Moishe, sister Lucia, and most of her extended family.
With her head bowed Mala, incarcerated at Ravensbruck and later Bergen-Belsen, solemnly said: “I intend to share my testimony for as long as I am able to, but there will come a time when this is not possible. The memory of the Holocaust cannot be left to fade when us eyewitnesses are no longer able to share our memories. As the Holocaust moves further into history future generations [need to] understand why it is important to learn from the past and stand up against injustice.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Queen Mary of Denmark at the remembrance service (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
More than 1.1 million people died in gas chambers, were shot or perished from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz, the Third Reich’s largest concentration camp, in less than five years.
The majority were Jews but 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 12,000 prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds including Czechs, Belorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Germans, and Austrians also perished here.
Inmates were transported there by rail from across Nazi-controlled Europe, herded into cattle trucks which arrived in daily convoys in ruthless efficiency.
Their fate rested in the hands of “Angel of Death” camp commandant Josef Mengele, with those considered able to work admitted into the camp, and those deemed unfit for hard labour immediately killed. About three-quarters of the total, including almost all children, women with small children, pregnant women, and the elderly, were slain.
Mengele chose who should be murdered – often several thousands at a time – and personally administered the gas.
Inside life held no significance. And while those who survived have tried hard to forget what they saw and heard, the tattoos on their left forearms serve as a permanent reminder that they were present, innocent witnesses, to the world’s greatest act of wickedness.
The plan of systematic genocide across occupied Europe was hatched by the Nazi leadership at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
By 1944 a three-track railroad spur and unloading ramp was operational at Auschwitz, ferrying as many Jews to their deaths as possible as mass murder was made functional and effortless.
Holocaust Memorial Day now stands as a caution to each of us that it is our shared duty to stand up against hate in all its forms and responsibility to protect the freedoms we cherish ultimately rests with us all.
A group of child survivors behind a barbed wire fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Image: Getty Images)
