Today, theworld marks 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz death camp. On the International Holocaust Memorial Day 2020, the worldstopped to remember one of the darkest periods in the history of humankind.
A dwindling number of elderly?Holocaust?survivors gathered atthe former German Nazi death camp on Monday to honour its more than 1.1 millionmostly Jewish victims and to share their alarm over rising anti-semitism.
More than 200 survivors came from across the globe to the camp the Nazisbuilt at Oswiecim in then-occupied Poland, to share their testimony as a starkwarning amid a recent surge of anti-semitic attacks on both sides of theAtlantic, some of them deadly.
Survivors dressed in blue and white striped caps and scarves symbolic ofthe uniforms prisoners wore at the camp, passed through its chilling"Arbeit macht Frei" (German for "Work makes you free")black wrought-iron gate.
Accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, they laid floral wreaths bythe Death Wall in Auschwitz where the Nazis shot dead thousands of prisoners.
"We want the next generation to know what we went through and thatit should never happen again," Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, saidearlier at the former death camp, his voice breaking with emotion.
Thirty-five members of his immediate and extended family of Romanian Jewswere killed in Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany's camps that has come tosymbolise the six million European Jews who died in the?Holocaust.
From mid-1942 the Nazis systematically deported Jews from all over Europeto six camps -- Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor andTreblinka.
Organisers insist that Monday's memorial ceremony must focus above all onwhat survivors have to say rather than the bitter political feuds that havetainted the run-up to the anniversary.
"This is about survivors, it's not about politics," RonaldLauder, head of the World Jewish Congress, told AFP in the Auschwitz camp, nowa memorial and state museum run by Poland.
"We see anti-semitism rising now and we don't want their (survivors)past to be their children's future or their grand children's future," headded.
Royals, presidents and prime ministers from nearly 60 countries willattend the ceremony, but no top world leaders, some of whom opted instead toattend a high-profile?Holocaust?forum in Israel last week seen asrivalling the ceremonies in Poland.
Poland's President Duda boycotted the Jerusalem forum after he was deniedthe opportunity to speak there while Russian President Vladimir Putin was giventhe floor, despite having earlier falsely accused Poland of colluding withGerman Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and contributing to the outbreak of World WarII.
Duda was to make an address at the Monday ceremony in Auschwitz alongsidesurvivors.
While the world only learned the full extent of its horrors after theSoviet Red Army entered the camp on January 27, 1945, the Allies had detailedinformation about Nazi Germany's genocide against Jews much earlier.
In December 1942, Poland's then London-based government-in-exileforwarded a document, titled "The Mass Extermination of Jews in GermanOccupied Poland", to the Allies.
The document included detailed accounts of the unfolding?Holocaust?aswitnessed by members of the Polish resistance, but drew disbelief and onlymuted reactions from the international community.
To inform the Allies, Polish resistance fighters Jan Karski and WitoldPilecki famously risked their lives in separate operations to infiltrate andthen escape from Nazi death camps and ghettos in occupied Poland, includingAuschwitz.
Regarded as exaggeration and Polish war propaganda, "a lot of thesereports were simply not believed", renowned Oxford historian ProfessorNorman Davies told AFP.
Despite "strong demands" by the Polish and Jewish resistancefor the Allies to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz and other death camps,"the military's attitude was 'we've got to concentrate on militarytargets, not on civilian things'", said Davies.
"One of the targets that the (British) military did bomb was asynthetic fuel factory near Auschwitz" in 1943-44, he added.
Although Allied warplanes flew over the death camp itself, no orders weregiven to bomb it.
"It was one of the biggest crimes committed by those that wereindifferent, because they (the Allies) knew what was happening here, they couldhave done something about it and they deliberately didn't," Auschwitzsurvivor David Lenga, 93, told AFP, standing next to a barbed-wire fence insidethe former camp.
"People of this world need to be educated about the consequenceswhen they become indifferent to evil; if you let evil raise its ugly head, this(the?Holocaust) is exactly what is going to happen," said Lenga, aPolish Jew who now lives in California.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of all Nazi death and concentrationcamps and the one where most people were killed, primarily European Jews, butalso Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and Poles.
Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vastnetwork of camps across Europe set up for Hitler's "Final Solution"of genocide against the estimated 10 million Jews in Europe.