H o l o c a u s t   S u r v i v o r s '  N e t w o r k

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A Factory of Death is Remembered, 60 Years Later
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... preserving the past to protect the future ....

Liberators and Survivors
Recall the Auschwitz That Was

Remembering ...

Survivors, along with world leaders and liberators, gathered yesterday to mark the day 60 years ago when the Red Army freed the Auschwitz death camp. [Photo:Katarina Stoltz/Reuters]


By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: January 28, 2005

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU, Poland, Jan. 27 -- Genry Koptev Gomolov was just 18 when he first saw this place, on Jan. 27, 1945. He had been drafted into the Red Army two years earlier and was making his way on foot across the Polish countryside with the remains of his battalion when they stumbled upon the Nazis' largest death camp.

"It was cold and gloomy with wet snow falling, like now," Mr. Gomolov said, riding a bus toward the camp for his first visit there in 60 years. He and two other former Red Army soldiers were guests of honor at a ceremony here Thursday marking the anniversary of the camp's liberation.

Officials from more than 30 countries gathered for the commemoration and called again for the world to "never forget" the horrors of the Holocaust, but it was recollections by the ever-dwindling number of witnesses that gave the day meaning.

"We saw the barbed wire and we understood it was a camp," Mr. Gomolov said, lifting a finger at a line of concrete posts studded with insulators and still strung with wire.

He recalled that once inside the camp he and his comrades found thousands of wraithlike people laughing and crying, singing and shouting, or simply staring dumbly at their liberators. He saw corpses stacked like cordwood and abandoned before the Nazis could set them on fire. He saw the crematories and the subterranean rooms he later learned were gas chambers.

"It made a deep impression," he said quietly, thick bifocals magnifying his eyes. He eased down from the bus and into the snow.

Thursday's cold penetrated the overcoats of the people gathered for the ceremony. It seeped into shoes, burned toes and turned hands raw. The discomfort only lasted a couple of hours but it was a stark indication of the suffering that inmates of this camp endured, without relief, except through death. Many people remarked on it.

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Former camp inmates placed candles on the death camp memorial. [Photo: Jockel Finck /Associated Press]

"In wintertime, the mortality was terrible," said Sigmund Sobolweski, 81, who spent four and a half years in the camp.

Some survivors remember a bar, slightly more than three feet high, that SS officers used to separate children who could work from those too young to be useful. Those shorter were sent to the gas chambers. Many children, survivors say, sensed the danger and strained to reach above the bar.

Most people who arrived at the camp were sent to the gas chambers within hours. Others, deemed fit enough to work, were stripped, shaved and tattooed with an identity number on their arm.

Jozef Drozdz wore the coarse blue and white cap from his former prison uniform to the ceremony. He was captured by the Nazis in 1940, and worked on building the first phase of the Auschwitz complex before being moved through eight more camps. "The Nazis knocked my teeth out," he said, flashing his dentures in an even smile.

The ceremony began with the haunting sounds of train whistles, evoking the arrival of prisoners on a railroad that still runs deep into the camp and was lined Thursday with candles.

The presidents of Russia, Poland and Israel along with several camp survivors spoke to the assembled crowd, repeating the need to keep awareness of the Holocaust alive after the last survivors have died.

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About 1.5 million people were killed at the Auschwitz complex. [Photo: NY Times]

Simone Veil, a French lawmaker, spoke on behalf of Jewish victims, a million of whom died in the camp. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish foreign minister who was interned in the camp, spoke on behalf of Polish victims. Romani Rose, from Germany's Council of Romas, spoke for European Gypsies who were also interned and killed there.

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, representing the liberators of Auschwitz, used the occasion to warn against compromising with terrorists. He has been criticized for his country's war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya, which has spawned a singularly violent movement. He said the Holocaust showed that just "as there were no 'good' and 'bad' fascists, there cannot be 'good' and 'bad' terrorists."

"We shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said. "Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism."

President Moshe Katsav of Israel said at an earlier event that the allies "did not do enough" to prevent the killing of Jews in World War II and called upon the European Union "not to allow Nazism to live in the imagination of the youth of Europe like some kind of horror show."

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at the earlier event, said, "The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and confronted."

But the comments underscored an important difference between the anti-Semitism of the 1930's that led to the Holocaust and that appearing more recently: while many governments across Europe approved or at least tolerated anti-Semitism then, it is uniformly condemned today.

Of all Thursday's speakers, the most impassioned was Merka Shevach, anelderly woman from Bialystok, Poland, who now lives in Israel. She took the microphone to give an unscheduled, impromptu speech as dusk fell.

"I was here naked as a young girl, I was 16," Ms. Shevach shouted to the crowd. "They brought my family here and burnt them, they stole my name and gave me a number."

She pulled back her sleeve to show the tattoo: 15755.

"Now," she said, "I have a country, I have an army, I have a president, I have a flag and this will never happen again."

As the ceremony ended, world leaders placed candles on a memorial set between the ruins of two crematories. A dozen thin spotlights reached into the sky, catching snowflakes in their beams. Other spotlights, mounted in the guard towers, swept the snowy fields.

Finally, a locomotive whistle blared and the train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematories were set ablaze to form two flaming lines through the snow.

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Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/international/europe/28auschwitz.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all
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