OSWIECIM, Poland
When the Soviet army entered Auschwitz exactly 70 years ago, finding piles of corpses and prisoners close to death, a Russian soldier took a small and hungry 11-year-old girl into his arms and rocked her tenderly, tears coming to his eyes.
That girl, today the 81-year-old Paula Lebovics, doesn’t know who that soldier was but still feels enormous gratitude to him and the other Soviet soldiers who liberated the camp on January 27, 1945.
To her, it is a shame that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be among other European leaders on Tuesday on the anniversary of the death camp’s liberation, his absence coming amid a deep chill between Russia and the West over the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine.
“He should be there,” said Lebovics, who travelled from her home in Encino, California, back to the land of her birth for Tuesday’s ceremonies. “They were our liberators.”
Among the leaders to attend are the presidents of Germany and Austria, the perpetrator nations that have spent decades atoning for their sins, as well as French President Francois Hollande and others. The United States is sending a delegation led by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
Poland apparently snubbed Putin, though officials will not admit that openly. The organisers, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Auschwitz Council, opted for a form of protocol this year which avoided direct invitations by Poland’s president to his foreign counterparts. The organisers instead simply asked countries that are donors to Auschwitz, including Russia, whom they planned to send. Poland’s Foreign Ministry says Putin could have attended if he wanted to.
On the eve of the landmark event, which is expected to draw several heads of state, a leading Jewish organisation was echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg in highlighting violence against Jews in modern-day Europe.
Merkel said it was a “disgrace” that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats or violence, as she joined survivors on Monday in Berlin observing 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army.
Spielberg pointed to what he termed “the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe” amid a rise in anti-Semitism on the continent underscored by the deadly Islamist attack on a Jewish Kosher grocery in Paris earlier this month.
Awarded an Oscar for the Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List”, Spielberg — who has also videotaped the testimony of 58,000 survivors — met with hundreds of them, mostly in their nineties, in Krakow, southern Poland.
The meeting came ahead of Tuesday’s ceremonies at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau site in nearby Oswiecim.
The Russian delegation will be led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff.
“It’s not good,” said Lebovics, who was at the 60th anniversary events a decade ago and was moved by a speech Putin gave on that occasion condemning anti-Semitism.
Some other Holocaust survivors, asked Monday at Auschwitz about who should represent Russia, didn’t want to discuss the matter, saying it was a time to honour Holocaust victims, not enter into political polemics. Some reacted emotionally at the mention of the conflict in Ukraine, remembering how Ukrainians helped the Nazis kill Jews during the war.
Not all Soviet actions were heroic: There were also cases of Soviet soldiers who raped Jewish women who survived death camps after the war.
“A lot of people have bad memories from that [the liberation] but I have good ones. I am very grateful,” Lebovics said.
Natan Grossmann, a survivor who now lives in Munich, also feels Putin should have been invited.
“They put their lives on the line to free us. They lost their lives and we should honour them,” Grossmann said.
At the United Nations, commemorations planned for Tuesday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, were cancelled because of a snowstorm in New York.
Also attending is Celina Biniaz, elegant at 83, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being placed on Oskar Schindler’s famous list.
As a child she left death camp to work in a nearby factory run by the German industrialist.
“I so wish they would settle that problem in the Middle East because I so believe that it has a definite impact on what’s happening with anti-Semitism all over Europe,” Biniaz, who came from California for the ceremonies, told AFP.
“The Muslims have been disenfranchised and their young have no hope for the future, so they are desperate and it sounds glamorous for them to join things like ISIS [Daesh],” she said, referring to the Daesh group that has captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.
For survivor David Wisnia, his return to Auschwitz is bringing on nightmares and flashbacks for the first time.
“It’s a lifetime ago really,” the 88-year-old said.
“Last night sleeping... here, I had a horrible dream and woke up and looked out the window and sort of thought that I was back in Birkenau in cell block 14 where I started in 1942,” he told journalists ahead of Tuesday’s ceremonies.
Part of Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler’s genocide plan against European Jews, dubbed the “Final Solution”, Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the then-occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.
Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, some 1.1 million — mainly European Jews — perished, either asphyxiated in the gas chambers or claimed by starvation, exhaustion and disease.
In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe’s 11 million Jews.
Historical records show that by 1942, the Polish resistance was providing Allied powers and Jewish community leaders in the US with the first detailed eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.
But inexplicably, Washington and London failed to act against the six death camps the Nazis set up in occupied Poland.
“The debate as to why the Allies did not bomb the supply lines to Auschwitz remains unresolved,” survivor Marcel Tuchman told AFP in Krakow Monday.
“Whether it was a sinister reason behind it or whether it was just tactical, in that they didn’t want to divert their air force remains unclear,” the 93-year-old said.
“A little bomb in the proper place, it would have really helped.”
