As candles flickered in the winter gloom, world leaders and Auschwitz survivors yesterday remembered victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.
The ceremony, which opened with the recorded rumble of an approaching train, was held on the spot where new arrivals were brought in by rail to the camp and put through "selection" — meaning those able to work were separated from the rest, who were taken to the gas chambers.
"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," Israeli President Moshe Katsav said. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."
Joining in the commemoration were Vice President Dick Cheney, and Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jacques Chirac of France and Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. German President Horst Koehler sat without speaking.
Barbed wire and brick barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. The ruined crematoriums loomed nearby. Girl Scouts brought blankets to elderly survivors sitting in the freezing cold.
"For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland's foreign minister.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau on Jan. 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died at those camps alone.
Earlier in Krakow, Cheney said, "The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and . . . confronted."
[Which is what we're doing right now to the IslamoNazis in the WOT!--Jen]
Putin won long applause when he acknowledged that anti-Semitism had resurfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront.
[..and still isn't confronting.
This is nothing but Putin giving nice-sounding sound bytes.]
"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism . . . we sometimes, unfortunately, see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said.
[Russia has an abyssmal human rights record with Jews, under both the Czarist regime, the Communist and now the Russian Federation.
Anti-Semitism is imbedded deep in their consciousness as it was/is in the German one.--J.T.]
Survivor Franciszek Jozefiak, 80, said efforts to educate new generations about the Holocaust should be strengthened.
"Today, I'm remembering my father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us here," said Jozefiak.
"The message today is: No more Auschwitz. But the world has learned nothing so far — you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere.
"Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget."
God rest the souls of those who were murdered in these death camps and may He continue to bless and comfort their relatives and survivors.
Some of these EUropean heads of state like ChIraq are here for photo ops and some display of their public wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Holocaust while downplaying the rash of anti-Semitic attacks in their own countries that have occurred since Arafat started the Intifada in 2000 and particularly since the 9/11 attacks which effectively declared "open season" on Jews, Christians, Americans and other "infidels."
VP Cheney is quite right: Evil is still evil and anti-Semitism is one of its hallmarks.
Yet, rather than reverently mark this anniversary and stress the importance of learning the lessons of Auschwitz, the MSM (in the form of the WashingtonCompost) expends its ink bemoaning Cheney's "inappropriate" outerware.
Nevermind that it was 9 degrees at Auschwitz and that Cheney is an older man with heart problems, he should have had on better fashion!
(This WaPo "Parkagate" column was written by the same woman who demonized Katherine Harris for her makeup during the election recount in 2000.)
All I could think about when I saw the pictures from the ceremony was that it was every bit as cold there in the war years (1944, especially, was one of the coldest winters on record) and one couldn't help but recall the poor detainees of the death camps who were allowed to live (for awhile longer), but who were forced to do slave labor covered only in those thin cotton mattress ticking pajamas.
If anything, our Vice President was a living example of how punishing even the climate of Auschwitz-Birkenau was.
I'm glad he was there to represent us and I'm darn proud of all of those fine men and women of the previous Greatest Generation who won the war, liberated the death camps and saved more innocents from the gas chambers!
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