Putin lighting a candle during a ceremony at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow.
DPA/Reuters/AFP/Berlin
World leaders appealed against anti-Semitism yesterday as they marked UN Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year coincides with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-operated Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Addressing the German parliament in Berlin, German President Joachim Gauck said: “The memory of the Holocaust remains an issue for all Germans.”
There is no German identity without Auschwitz. It belongs to the history of this country,” Gauck told the Bundestag.
Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans not to forget and hailed the fact that more than 100,000 Jews now live in Germany.
During a meeting with Auschwitz survivors, Merkel said it was “a disgrace that people in Germany are harassed, threatened or attacked if they somehow identify as Jews or if they take the side of the state of Israel.”
This year’s anniversary comes as Germany’s political leaders struggle to deal with anti-Islam and anti-refugee protests.
In her speech, Merkel said Auschwitz was a warning that people should not support hateful slogans against refugees and migrants.
Speaking in Paris before attending remembrance ceremonies in Poland, French President Francois Hollande lamented the growing frequency of anti-Semitic acts as “an intolerable reality”.
A study released yesterday in France showed that anti-Semitic acts in France doubled last year compared to 2013, and violent acts increased by 130%.
France has Europe’s largest Jewish population.
Hollande said the government will next month unveil a plan to fight anti-Semitism and racism.
The plan would include maintaining heightened security and cracking down on digital misinformation and propaganda.
Some 76,000 French Jews were deported – mostly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and labour camps – under the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Germany’s Nazis.
Speaking nearly three weeks after a series of terrorist attacks sharpened social and religious tensions in France – the gunmen and two of the victims were of Muslim background, while four Jews were shot dead when one of the gunmen targeted a kosher market – Hollande decried divisions.
“France is your country,” Hollande told French Jews amid reports that the country is experiencing a record exodus of Jewish people.
US President Barack Obama, in a statement, said that the Paris attacks were a “painful reminder of our obligation to condemn and combat rising anti-Semitism in all its forms, including the denial or trivialisation of the Holocaust”.
Reinhard Buetikofer and Monica Frassoni, the co-chairs of the European Green Party, made a direct link between this month’s terrorist attacks in France, the arrest of Islamic terrorists in Belgium, and the Shoah, another word for the Holocaust.
“Anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia are not dead in Europe. The killing of Jews in Paris and Brussels reminds us of this dark side of European reality. We pledge to continue fighting against it and against all types of prejudice. By doing that we honour the memory of the millions of victims of the Shoah,” they wrote in a joint statement.
In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin marked the liberation of the Nazi camp by Soviet troops with a tribute to Soviet Jews who fought in the Red Army, 200,000 of whom were killed.
“Such crimes do not and cannot have an expiry date,” Putin said of the Holocaust during a memorial ceremony at Moscow’s Jewish Museum.
He added that any attempts to suppress or distort the memory of the Holocaust are inadmissible.
In the run-up to the ceremony Poland angered Moscow when its foreign minister, Grzegorz Schetyna, said it was Ukrainian soldiers – rather than the Soviet army – who liberated the camp.
Moscow blasted Warsaw for twisting history for political ends.
Putin has repeatedly condemned the West for what he calls attempts to belittle the Soviet army’s role in the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and to glorify Nazi collaborators in eastern Europe and ex-Soviet republics such as Ukraine.
At the ceremony, Putin also drew parallels with the current Ukraine crisis which has sent Moscow’s ties with the West to post-Cold War lows and seen imposition of punishing Western sanctions against Russia.
“We all know how dangerous and destructive are double standards, indifference to and disregard for another man’s fate as is the case with the current tragedy in eastern Ukraine,” the Kremlin strongman said at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre.
Putin’s absence at the ceremony at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is now a museum, raised eyebrows at home since the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
British Prime Minister David Cameron also stressed the importance of remembering the Holocaust as a means of fighting discrimination.
“Part of why remembering the Holocaust matters so much is that it reminds people where anti-Semitism, prejudice and hatred end. The two things are very much linked,” he said.
In addition to the commemorations taking place in Poland, the UN is to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a series of initiatives in New York attended by, among others, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
However, the UN events had to be postponed to Wednesday due to heavy snow in New York City.
In Oswiecim, Poland, world leaders joined around 300 Auschwitz survivors at the site of the former Nazi death camp to mark 70 years since its liberation by Soviet troops, an anniversary held in the shadow of war in Ukraine and a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe.
Yesterday’s gathering in southern Poland marks perhaps the last major anniversary that survivors of the camp will be able to attend in numbers, given the youngest are now in their 70s.
Some 1,500 attended the 60th anniversary.
Around 1.5 million people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged and burned at the camp in southern Poland during World War II, before the Red Army entered its gates in winter 1945.
It has become probably the most poignant symbol of a Holocaust that claimed 6mn Jewish lives across Europe.
The presidents of Poland, Germany, and France were among hundreds attending the commemoration in a giant tent erected over the brickwork entrance to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, part of the complex that is now a museum.
The railway tracks that bore Jews in wagons from all across Europe to their deaths were lit up gold, the countryside around covered in deep snow.
The camp’s victims also included, among others, Roma, homosexuals and all shades of political opposition to the Nazis.
Notable for his absence was Putin, whose backing of pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine has helped drive West-Russia relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War.
Poland has been one of the most vociferous critics of Russia’s March annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its support for rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Wary of the domestic political consequences, Poland did not send a full diplomatic invitation to Putin, sources have told Reuters.
“It would be hard to imagine, in this situation, hosting Russia’s president. Albeit informally, Russia is taking part in this conflict,” Polish Justice Minister Cezary Grabarcyk told Polish ZET radio.
Nato says Russia has sent men and armour to aid the separatists.
Putin denies this, but risks new sanctions when European Union foreign ministers meet tomorrow.
Russia was represented at the commemoration by Putin’s chief-of-staff, Sergei Ivanov.
David Wisnia, an 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz, said on Monday that the Holocaust was “almost impossible for a human mind to comprehend”.
A choir boy as a child at Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, which was blown up by Nazi forces in 1943, Wisnia sang a memorial prayer in Hebrew yesterday.
“I pray to God that we as human beings are able to learn something from it,” he said.
