Under an enormous, white tent that covered the death camp entrance, the director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, issued a plea to protect the memory of what had happened, as the survivors died out.
“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides… without memory you have no history, no experience, no point of reference,” he said, as survivors listened on, many of them wearing blue-and-white striped scarves to symbolise prisoners’ clothing.
Memory was the watchword of this day, marked around the world as International Holocaust Memorial Day.
Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged that Poland could be entrusted to preserve the memory of the six death camps on its territory, at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno. “We are the guardians of memory,” he said, after laying a wreath at the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed at Auschwitz 1, the concentration camp 3km (1.85 miles) away from Birkenau.
