World gathers at Auschwitz
2005-01-27 10:02
Auschwitz - Some of the last remaining survivors of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in southern Poland will gather here on Thursday, alongside world leaders and soldiers from the Soviet Red Army, for a solemn ceremony to mark the camp's liberation 60 years ago.
A day of commemorative events was scheduled to begin with a forum entitled "Let my People Live", organised by the European Jewish Congress, bringing young people from around the world face to face with survivors of Auschwitz and the former Soviet soldiers who freed the camp, many of them in their 80s.
It could mark "the last chance we have to gather this cross-section of people together in the same room," Moshe Kantor, chairman of the European Jewish Congress, told AFP.
At least 1.1 million men, women and children died at Auschwitz, the most notorious and efficient of German death camps.
Most of them were European Jews, who died in the camp's gas chambers almost immediately on arrival.
44 world leaders
At the forum, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski will decorate several former soldiers of the Red Army who liberated the camp on January 27 1945 in the midst of a bitterly cold Polish winter that saw temperatures dip to -30°C.
French President Jacques Chirac will inaugurate an exhibit in recently renovated prisoner block 20 at Auschwitz's main camp, which sits on the outskirts of the town of Oswiecim, in honour of 80 000 French nationals who were deported to this death camp in southern Poland and others in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The main commemorative ceremony will begin at 14:30 at a memorial erected at Birkenau, three kilometres from the main camp, to the memory of the men, women and children who died at the camp.
Most of the 44 world leaders expected to attend the ceremonies, including United States vice-president Dick Cheney, Israel's Moshe Katsav and Ukraine's new leader Viktor Yuschenko, had already arrived in Krakow on Wednesday
The start of the ceremony will be signalled by a train entering the Birkenau camp on the same track that brought hundreds of thousands of European Jews, and tens of thousands of others into the Nazi camp.
Former camp prisoners will address the gathering at the memorial.
An address from Pope John Paul II will be read out, followed by official speeches by Kwasniewski, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on behalf of the Soviet soldiers who liberated the camp, and Israeli President Moshe Katsav, for the majority of the camp's victims.
An ecumenical prayer will follow, after which the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner's prayer, will be intoned.
The ceremony will be closed with the lighting of candles by the memorial slabs of the monument, and the wail of the Shofar, the ritual instrument of ancient and modern Hebrews.