More than 50 world leaders, including King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, and Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch, joined a dwindling group of the Nazi death camp’s survivors on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) to commemorate the Soviet Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered. Others, including Poles, Russian prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, and homosexuals, were also marked for annihilation.
Elderly former inmates, some wearing scarves in the blue-and-white stripes of their death camp uniforms, laid flowers at the site, touching the camp’s Wall of Death in silence. Most walked slowly, many with canes or held up by young relatives.
Survivors and global leaders later lit candles at the empty wooden train car which sits on the tracks at Auschwitz. Since 2009, the carriage has stood in the middle of the unloading ramp, where SS doctors selected the deported Jews, directing most of them to their deaths.
The ceremony was conducted in silence, but applause rang out when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, and fighting the Russian invasion of his country, laid his candle.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lays a candle during commemorations at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland to mark 80 years since the liberation of the concentration camp.Credit: Getty
The train car is dedicated to the memory of about 420,000 Jews from Hungary who were sent to Auschwitz from May to July 1944. Among them was the father of Australian businessman, Holocaust survivor Frank Lowy, Hugo, who was beaten to death by the SS in the camp.
“I have carried the torch for his family and remembered him and his action that gave us, me and the family, the courage to carry on,” said Lowy before the service. “Since I was a little boy the knowledge of his resistance has given me reason to live.”
Australian-Israeli businessman Sir Frank Lowy attended the ceremony. Credit: Yadid Levy
Lowy said it serviced as a reminder of what society must learn from antisemitism.
“We need to respect each other,” he says. “Unfortunately the world has not developed to that effect.”
Tova Friedman, was just six years old when Auschwitz was liberated.
For her “whole life since I was a little girl” she thought of that day “as my birthday,” she told the crowd. “I celebrate it every single year,” Friedman, now 86, added.
Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman.Credit: Getty
Her memory of her time in the camp remains vivid in part because her mother validated her experiences at a young age, Friedman said, adding that she remembered listening to her friends being rounded up while the cries of their parents fell on deaf ears.
“After all the children were gone and the courtyard was empty,” she said, “I thought to myself, am I the only Jewish child left in the world?”
Ronald Lauder, the chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, said this year was “the most important anniversary we are going to have because of the shrinking number of survivors and because of what is happening in the world today.”
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In a strongly worded speech, Lauder, a billionaire donor for the Republicans in the United States, warned against the dramatic rise of antisemitism.
Referring directly to the October 7 attacks by Hamas, he said: “In a very fundamental way, what happened in Israel… and what happened here at Auschwitz, have one common thread: the age-old hatred of Jews.”
“Today, there are mass demonstrations against Jews. Today, we see vile comments all over social media. Then I remind you, this is not 1933 or 1939. This is 2025.”
The final act of this ceremony began with the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn – a haunting and uniting sound for Jews – which usually heralds the start of the Jewish New Year and the end of Yom Kippur. It was followed by the Jewish mourners’ prayer, Kaddish, recited by Poland’s Chief Rabbi.
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Auschwitz museum director, Piotr Cywiński, issued a rallying cry to protect the memory of the Holocaust and Auschwitz.
“Memory hurts. Memory helps. Memory guides. Memory warns. Memory raises awareness. Memory obliges,” he said.
“Do something good – whatever you can, in the best way you can. Do it for others, and … do it without the scope of your abilities. But do something. Act.”