Survivors of Auschwitz deliver warning from history as memories die out

Their numbers are dwindling but the voices of the Auschwitz survivors remain powerful

We were stripped of all humanity," said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of four who spoke beside the notorious Death Gate at the Birkenau extermination camp.

Marking 80 years since its liberation, world leaders and European royalty rubbed shoulders on Monday with 56 survivors of Hitler's genocide of European Jews.

"We were victims in a moral vacuum," said Tova Friedman, who described witnessing the horrors of Nazi persecution as a five-and-a-half-year-old girl clinging to her mother's hand.

She described watching from her hiding place at a labour camp "as all my little friends were rounded up and driven to their deaths, while the heartbreaking cries of their parents fell on deaf ears".

The warnings from history were clear: the survivors more than anyone understood the risks of intolerance, and antisemitism was the canary in the coal mine.

Under an enormous, white tent that covered the death camp entrance, Leon Weintraub appealed particularly to young people to be "sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment to people who are different".

The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.

Almost a million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and and an unknown number of gay men.

This was one of six death camps the Nazis built in occupied Poland in 1942, and it was by far the Another survivor to speak was Janina Iwanska, 94, a Catholic arrested as a child during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. She remembered how so-called Nazi "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele sent all the remaining Roma in the camp to their deaths at Birkenau, because he no longer needed them for his lethal medical experiments.

Marian Turski, 98, said only a few had survived the death camp and now they were but a handful. His thoughts turned to the millions of victims "who will never tell us what they experienced or they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction

The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, issued a plea to protect the memory of what had happened, as the survivors died ou

"Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides… without memory you have no history, no experience, no point of reference," he said, as survivors listened on, many of them wearing blue-and-white striped scarves to symbolise prisoners' clothin

Memory was the watchword of this day, marked around the world as International Holocaust Memorial Da

Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged that Poland could be entrusted to preserve the memory of the six death camps on its territory, at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmnoy.g.t.".