Auschwitz survivors mark 76 years since liberation, online amid pandemic

A Jewish prayer for the souls of the people murdered in the Holocaust echoed Wednesday over where the Warsaw ghetto stood during World War II as a world paused by the coronavirus pandemic observed the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Most International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations were being held online this year due to the virus, including the annual ceremony at the site of the former Auschwitz death camp, where Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people in occupied Poland.

The memorial site is closed to visitors because of the pandemic.

Marian Turski, a 94-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, marked the anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops only virtually.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial preserves the Auschwitz death camp set up on Polish soil by Nazi Germany during World War Two. More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished in gas chambers at the camp or from starvation, cold and disease.

Wednesday's ceremony marking the camp's liberation included speeches by survivors, Poland's President Andrzej Duda and Israeli and Russian diplomats, as well as a debate on the Holocaust's influence on children.

Other virtual ceremonies also took place to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Memorial has been closed to visitors for 161 days due to the pandemic. In 2019 it was visited by around 2.3 million people. In 2020 that number dropped to around 502,000.

The Museum's director, Piotr Cywinski, acknowledged virtual events and education programmes were not as effective in passing on the lessons of the Holocaust and World War Two.

Survivors emphasised the importance of finding ways to keep Auschwitz relevant after they can no longer tell their own stories, amid a rise in far-right movements and anti-Semitism.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked survivors for their first-hand accounts and warned against anti-semitism in a message for a virtual commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance day organized by the UN and UNESCO.