Auschwitz survivors mark camp's liberation

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

Auschwitz survivors mark camp's liberation
by Vanessa Gera


OSWIECIM, Poland – Dozens of Nazi death camp survivors gathered Tuesday in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim — which the German occupiers called Auschwitz — to remember the horrors they lived through and celebrate the acts of humanity or randomness of fate that kept them alive.

Survivors and government officials marked the 64th anniversary of the day the advancing Soviet army liberated the camp in 1945. The anniversary has been established as an annual Holocaust remembrance day by the United Nations.

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/File/photo//090122/photos_ts_wl_afp/c...
A view of the entrance to Auschwitz, former Nazi death camp, in Oswiecim, Poland. Video testimony of … ( photo)


Bronislawa Horowitz-Karakulska, 78, credited her survival to destiny — and to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose story was told in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." He shielded more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring them to work in his factories.

"The fact that I am alive — for this I thank Oskar Schindler and the fact that he was able to get me and 300 women out of here and get us to the camp in Brunnlitz," Horowitz-Karakulska said, speaking in a school gymnasium to a group of local high-school students.

More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died Auschwitz's gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation.

Another survivor, Tadeusz Sobolewicz, 85, accused Germany's younger generations of forgetting about the horrors their country inflicted, and misrepresenting history by playing up their own suffering.

"The columns of many Western newspapers are full of information about the sufferings of the German people, the underground struggle against Hitler, the assassination attempts against him, and so on," he said.

And while some non-Jewish Germans were also killed in Nazi camps, "you cannot compare the German nation's victims and losses to the extermination" of the millions of Poles, Jews, Roma and others killed throughout Europe, he said.

Still, in a speech in Germany's lower house of parliament, President Horst Koehler praised young Germans' efforts to learn about their nation's history and honor the victims of the Holocaust.

"Responsibility for the Shoah is part of the German identity," Koehler told members of parliament.

The country's main Jewish group, however, boycotted the ceremony, saying they were snubbed by not being officially greeted by the speakers at the event.

In Warsaw, an antique tram car topped with the Jewish Star of David trundled through neighborhoods in what was once the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The tram traveled empty through the now-bustling streets of the Polish capital to symbolize the absence of those who perished in the Holocaust.

Italian lawmakers in Rome observed a minute of silence, and Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who heads a conservative bloc that includes former neo-fascists, urged teachers and students to treasure and mark the anniversary "so that Remembrance Day can teach to everyone the value of peace and peaceful coexistence among peoples."

As aging Holocaust survivors grow frailer and fewer in number, Auschwitz-Birkenau — established by the Nazis in occupied Poland — is in such a state of disrepair that its preservation is under threat.

The Polish state officials who oversee the camp say at least euro100 million ($130 million) is needed in the next 15 to 20 years to maintain the site — money that it has so far failed to raise from the international community.

Already, the museum has had to seal off crumbling barracks, while the remains of the former gas chambers and crematoria are also deteriorating due to the land's yearly cycle of freezing and thawing.

"These buildings weren't built to last," said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum. "If we don't get the money, we'll have to close more and more buildings."

The museum, set up in 1947, received 12.7 million zlotys ($3.7 million) from the Polish government last year and earned about 13 million zlotys more by publishing survivor accounts, screening documentaries to visitors and from guide fees.

Private donations from abroad amount to only a small fraction of its income.
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Associated Press Writers Melissa Eddy in Berlin and Alessandra Rizzo in Rome contributed to this report.