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65th Anniversary of the Liberation

Wednesday, 27th January, 2010 — Former Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp

• 2.30 pm — Main ceremonies will be held in a heated tent (located in the so-called BIIf sector) put up specially for that purpose. On account of limited space passes will be required. Those without passes are requested to enter through the former women’s camp (the so-called BI sector). The participants staying outside the tent will be able to watch the ceremony on a big screen mounted specially on this occasion.

Over 150 former prisoners (including 115 from Poland) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek will attend the 65th anniversary ceremony at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in southern Poland today.

The main ceremony, at 14.30 CET will be led by former prisoner August Kowalczyk. Władysław Bartoszewski, Marian Turski and Edward Paczkowski will also contribute. Other speakers will include President Lech Kaczyński, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Russia’s minister of education, Andrei Fursenko.

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Auschwitz victims mourned on 65th anniversary

KRAKOW — Auschwitz survivors, Soviet veterans and leaders including Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu gather on Wednesday for emotionally-charged ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the notorious Nazi death camp's liberation.

Ahead of a commemoration at the site of the World War II camp in German-occupied Poland, 700 participants started assembling in the southern city of Krakow for a morning memorial event organised by the European Jewish Congress (EJC). Krakow

Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor and Tel Aviv resident Baruch Shub, 85, said he still bore the emotional scars of his suffering.

"There's a lot of sorrow, because when I came home, I found nobody in my family alive. But also a bit of happiness because the war was over and I'd somehow stayed alive," Shub told AFP.

"We encounter the worst evil in the history of mankind together with the greatest courage in the history of humanity," Netanyahu said at a former railhead where the Nazis sent more than 300,000 Jews to die.

"This is not an easy encounter but it gives us hope and direction for our future. May God avenge the victims," said the Israeli leader alongside his wife Sara, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were murdered.

Tel Aviv's Polish-born Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau -- a Holocaust orphan who survived as a child in Nazi camps -- will recite a Jewish prayer of mourning. Related article: Survivors span the history of Auschwitz

"We started meeting huddles of people. They came towards us, in prison stripes. Some had covers over their heads. We could only see their eyes. And in those eyes, we could see what they were feeling," he said.

"But we didn't know what it was. We only understood after the war," he added.

Kantor, 56, who is from Russia, said he feels extra emotion when he thinks of 1945.

"The majority of my family was murdered," he said.

"My father was in the Red Army. I always remember his feelings, his attitude being a soldier of the Red Army whose family disappeared in the Shoah. Those feelings created mine," he said.

Children of Auschwitz recall liberation 65 years ago

WARSAW — Kazimiera Wasiak is a 76-year-old Polish pensioner who will forever remain a child of Auschwitz.

When she was only 11, Wasiak spent six months in Nazi Germany?s largest and most infamous World War II death camp, barely surviving on "a slop of water and rye flour". Severely malnourished, she became gravely ill but believes this may have saved her life.

Today, as treasurer of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors' association in Warsaw, she meets regularly with a dwindling number of members, many of whom shared her fate like 78-year-old Stanislaw Przeradski.

"After living five years in Warsaw under the Nazis we were no longer children when we came to Auschwitz," said Przeradksi, who was only 13 at the time.

"We'd seen it all -- firing squads shooting innocents in the street, brutality, air raids," he told AFP. Warsaw.