Last survivors remember 1.5m killed at Auschwitz

World leaders joined around 300 Auschwitz survivors at the site of the former Nazi death camp to mark 70 years since its liberation by Soviet troops, an anniversary held in the shadow of conflict in Ukraine and the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe.

The gathering in southern Poland marks perhaps the last major anniversary that survivors of the camp will be able to attend in numbers, given the youngest are now in their 70s. Some 1,500 survivors attended the 60th anniversary.

Around 1.5m people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged, and burned at the camp in during the Second World War before the Red Army entered its gates in winter 1945. Auschwitz, some 60km west of Krakow, has become the most poignant symbol of the Holocaust, which claimed 6m Jewish lives across Europe.

The presidents of Poland, Germany, and France were among hundreds attending the commemoration in a giant tent erected over the brickwork entrance to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, part of the complex that is now a museum.

The railway tracks that bore Jews in wagons from all across Europe to their deaths were lit up gold, the countryside around covered in deep snow.

France’s François Hollande made the trip less than three weeks after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris in attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly newspaper and a kosher supermarket.

Four French Jews were among those killed, the latest victims of a recent spate of armed attacks on Jewish people in Europe.

Earlier in the day at the Paris Shoah memorial to French Jews who died during the Second World War, Hollande addressed France’s 550,000-strong Jewish community.

“You, French people of the Jewish faith, your place is here, in your home. France is your country,” he said.

European Jews warn of a growing under-current of anti-Semitism, fuelled by anger at Israeli policy in the Middle East and social tensions over issues of immigration, inequality, and economic hardship that have contributed to a rise of far-right political movements, notably the grassroots anti-Islam Pegida movement in Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germans had an everlasting responsibility to fight all forms of anti-Semitism and racism.

“We’ve got to expose those who promote prejudices and conjure up bogeymen, the old ones as well as the new,” Merkel said.

The camp’s victims also included, among others, Roma, gay people, and all shades of political opposition to the Nazis.

David Wisnia, an 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, said on Monday that the Holocaust was “almost impossible for a human mind to comprehend”. A choir boy as a child at Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia sang a memorial prayer in Hebrew at yesterday’s ceremony.

“I pray to God that we as human beings are able to learn something from it,” he said.