Event marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Representatives from more than 20 countries are due to attend a special event to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
His Majesty King Charles III has accepted an invitation to join Holocaust survivors and representatives from a range of nations.
The event takes place on Monday (27 January) which marks the date, in 1945, when Soviet forces liberated the camp. Upon entering, they found 7500 survivors, including more than 500 children.
Days before their arrival and more than 50,000 concentration camp inmates had been forced to start to walk westwards. Surrounded by SS troops, thousands of people died along the way.
The date of 27 January was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005 by the United Nations.
More than six million people died in The Holocaust with one million deaths attributed to Auschwitz alone – with many victims dying in the gas chambers. The vast majority of the victims were Jewish men, women and children.
Commemoration and remembrance
Freight train cars were used to transport people from across occupied Europe. As soon as the doors were opened, families would start to be separated from each other as SS doctors decided who would be killed – and those who would be forced into labour.
The commemoration will see one of the remaining railroad wagons being placed directly in front of the main gate of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It’s been in the middle of the unloading ramp since 2009 and is a symbol for the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Breaktime News has previously reported on the story of the British POWs sent to E715 Auschwitz during World War Two. There were several hundred Allied men imprisoned next to the concentration camp.
The Geneva Convention allowed the prisoners-of-war to receive Red Cross parcels – but their proximity to the camp meant they were firsthand witnesses to the starvation and suffering of the people forced to work there.
Many of the returning soldiers provided testimony to the war crimes commission about what they had seen during their internment. More recently, a few of the E715 POWs recorded their memories for the USHMM oral history archive.