Auschwitz anniversary marked as Europe’s peace again shattered by war

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Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau are gathering Friday to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp in the final months of World War II, amid the horror of war again shattering peace in Europe.

The former concentration and extermination camp is located in the town of Oświęcim in southern Poland, which during World War II was under the occupation of German forces and became a place of systematic murder of Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and others targeted for elimination by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

In all, some 1.1 million people were killed at the vast complex before it was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945.

Today the site, with its barracks and barbed wire and the ruins of gas chambers, stands as one of the world’s most recognized symbols of evil and an admonition of “Never Again” that has been a site of pilgrimage for millions.

Yet it lies only 185 miles from Ukraine, where Russian aggression is creating unthinkable death and destruction — a conflict on the minds of many of those paying tribute to the victims of eight decades ago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended observances marking the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in 2005. But he has been unwelcome for years now.

This year, no Russian official at all was invited due to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Bogdan Bartnikowski, a Pole who was 12 years old when he was transported to Auschwitz, said the first images he saw on television last February of refugees fleeing after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered traumatic memories.

He was stunned seeing a little girl in a large crowd of refugees holding her mother with one hand and grasping a teddy bear in the other.

“It was literally a blow to the head for me because I suddenly saw, after almost 80 years, what I had seen in a freight car when I was being transported to Auschwitz. A little girl was sitting next to me, hugging a doll to her chest,” Bartnikowski, now 91, said.

Bartnikowski was among several survivors of Auschwitz who spoke about their experiences to journalists on the eve of Friday’s commemorations.

One of the others, Stefania Wernik, who was born at Auschwitz in November 1944, less than three months before its liberation, spoke of Auschwitz being a “hell on earth.”

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