Auschwitz and Warsaw mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day

This morning Holocaust survivors, dignitaries, and religious leaders assemble at the site of the Auschwitz German Nazi WW II death camp which was located in occupied southern Poland to commemorate the memory of the 1.1 million who lost their lives there during WW II.

They will also honor the soldiers of the Red Army who, 67 years ago, today, liberated the remaining 7,000 inmates.

The date of the liberation of Auschwitz was the inspiration for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated as such by the United Nations in 2005, in memory of the genocide that resulted in the annihilation of 6 million European Jews, 2 million Gypsies,and millions of others by the Nazi regime.

Events will begin in Warsaw at the Umschlagplatz Monument where Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were assembled to board the trains which transported them to the death camp at Treblinka.

Government representatives will lay wreaths at the monument and a symbolic passenger-less tram will travel through the capital in memory of the dead.

Meanwhile, the Auschwitz State Museum exhibited, for the first time to the public today, the one surviving gas chamber door, where the Nazis killed their victims in a programme that started 70 years ago.

The Nazis blew up most of the camp as they retreated.

Museum director Piotr Cywinski told Polish Radio that the Holocaust was the “suffering and death of millions of completely innocent people just because of the fact that they were Jews. That is why we want to show this tangible relic: the only surviving door to the gas chambers of Birkenau.” (pg)