OAN Staff Abril Elfi
1:32 PM – Monday, January 27, 2025
Auschwitz memorial has held observances on the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops.
Many survivors gathered at the site alongside world leaders including Britain’s King Charles, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. However, none spoke at the event, which focused on the voices of survivors.
“It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything,” said Holocaust survivor Jona Laks, 94, about her return to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“But it’s necessary,” she said. “It’s necessary for the world to know.”
Laks spent over a year at the camp when she was about 12-years-old. She stated how her and her twin sister, Mariam, experienced horrors in the inhumane medical experiments of SS physician Josef Mengele.
According to CNN, Laks was set to be murdered in the gas chambers, but her older sister saved her by shouting that the twins should not be separated.
Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945, many of them Jews but also other victims of the Third Reich included the Poles, the Roma, and the Soviet prisoners of war.
The concentration camp’s survivors were all invited to the memorial and could bring a person along for support.
“We are fully aware of how physically demanding and emotionally taxing attending the commemoration event at the site of the former camp can be for them,” the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum said in a statement.
A freight rail car, one of the 80th anniversary’s symbols, will be positioned right in front of the main entrance. The rail wagon is devoted to honoring the roughly 420,000 Jews from Hungary who were sent to Auschwitz.
During the totality of the Holocaust, 11 million victims were killed. Of those 11 million murdered, six million individuals were Jewish victims and 5 million were non-Jewish victims.
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