Holocaust survivors return to Auschwitz to mark 75 years since liberation of Nazi death camp

Over 200 survivors from around the world gathered in Poland to honour the 1.1 million victims of the German Nazi concentration camp

The survivors also warned against a recent surge in anti-Semitic attacks

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A survivor wipes away tears during a wreath-laying ceremony at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:45pm, 27 Jan 2020Updated: 10:29pm, 27 Jan 2020

Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a dwindling number of elderly Holocaust survivors gathered at the former German Nazi death camp on Monday to honour its more than 1.1 million mostly Jewish victims and to share their alarm over rising anti-Semitism.

More than 200 survivors came from across the globe to the camp the Nazis built at Oswiecim in then-occupied Poland, to share their testimony as a stark warning amid a recent surge of anti-Semitic attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them deadly.

Survivors dressed in blue and white striped caps and scarves symbolic of the uniforms prisoners wore at the camp, passed through its chilling “Arbeit macht Frei” (German for “Work makes you free”) black wrought-iron gate.

Poland's President Andrzej Duda and his Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin attend a wreath-laying ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Photo: Reuters

Accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, they laid floral wreaths by the Death Wall in Auschwitz where the Nazis shot dead thousands of prisoners.

“We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again,” Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, said earlier at the former death camp, his voice breaking with emotion.