Polish PM commemorates Auschwitz Liberation Day anniversary

“What happened here in the German death camp was ‘evil’. It was evil which was deceitful, cruel, and impossible to imagine, and could only be defeated by ‘good’,” Szydło said.

She added: “Memory and truth is our duty, it is our weapon against evil.”

Szydło said that it is hard to choose the right words to speak about what happened in the Auschwitz German Nazi camp.

“It was here that people took away from other people that which made them human,” Szydło said during the commemoration on Friday. “They took away not only their lives, but everything that defines us as human beings.”

The ceremony at the site of the camp was attended by some 60 former camp inmates alongside delegates from Israel and Russia.

The Auschwitz Birkenau camp operated from 1940 until its liberation by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January, 1945.

Former inmates of the camp attended the ceremony on Friday. Photo: PAP/Andrzej Grygiel

Over 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished in Auschwitz at the hands of Poland’s German Nazi occupiers during World War II.

The main theme of this year's anniversary will be "Time" symbolized by a watch, which was found during archaeological works carried out in the gas chamber and crematorium III in 1967, and which was returned to the Museum this year.

“Time inevitably distances us from the history of Auschwitz. Memory is always a struggle with time. Time is also what we lack in our mission of making successive generations aware of the dangers of populism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and various national exoticisms,” said Dr. Piotr Cywiński, Director of the Auschwitz Museum. (tf/rg)