Auschwitz survivors warn of rising hatred on the 80th anniversary of the death camp's liberation

Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology.

Marian Turski, a 98-year-old Polish Jewish survivor, called on those gathered to turn their thoughts to the victims of the Holocaust, recalling that the number of those murdered was always far greater than the far smaller group of survivors.

"We have always been a tiny minority," Turski said. "And now only a handful remain."

In all, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe's Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Leon Weintraub, a 99-year-old survivor from Lodz, Poland, decried the rising hatred which he blames on "increasingly vocal movements of the radical and anti-democratic right." He said he also sees that in Sweden, where he settled after fleeing postwar antisemitism in Poland.

"This ideology, an attitude that preaches hostility and hatred towards others, defines racism, antisemitism and homophobia as virtues," Weintraub, a doctor, said.

Germany was represented by both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first time that the country's two highest leaders attended. It was a sign of Germany's continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation's crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia's brutal invasion, was among those in attendance, along with Poland's President Andrzej Duda, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's King Charles III and other royalty.

Ukrainians, like Russians, made up the Red Army forces that liberated the camp.

"The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world," Zelenskyy, himself of Jewish descent, wrote on his Telegram page a day earlier.

Russian representatives were honored guests at the past observances in recognition of the Red Army liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945. But they have not been welcome since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Russian leadership expressed anger over its exclusion. "We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this dreadful, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history," President Vladimir Putin said in a message to participants.

Ronald Lauder, head of the World Jewish Congress, called on the leaders gathered to oppose antisemitism, saying it was "the world's silence that led to Auschwitz."

"When the Red Army entered these gates, the world finally saw where the step-by-step progression of antisemitism leads. It leads right here. The gas chambers. The piles of bodies. All the horrors within these gates," Lauder said.

He also said that while Adolf Hitler's first targets were Jews, by the time World War II was over, "more than 60 million human beings were dead and this continent lay in ruins."

Lauder, 80, recalled how he has been attending the anniversary observances for 50 years, but expected this year's event to be the last one where he will speak. "But I leave you today with the understanding that I did my best, I did my upmost to be worthy of the memory of all those who were lost here," he said.

Another survivor who spoke was 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was brought to the camp aged 5 with her mother and was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated. She recalled arriving after a long ride in a dark cattle car. She said she was hot, hungry, thirsty and very terrified and still remembers the cries of desperate women around her. When she arrived at Auschwitz the sky was obscured by dark smoke and stench from the burning bodies.

After the war Friedman settled in the United States where she became a therapist and raised a family. She fears that rising antisemitism is also destroying the safe haven that the United States represented for Jews in the postwar era.

"The world has become toxic," she told The Associated Press a day before the observances. "I realize that we're in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don't stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction."