Muslim religious leaders from across the globe pray yesterday in front of so-called ‘Death Wall’ (not shown) at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of an anti-genocide programme.
AFP/Oswiecim, Poland
Muslim religious leaders from across the globe knelt in solemn prayer for Holocaust dead at Auschwitz yesterday, their foreheads touching the ground before the notorious Wall of Death at the former Nazi German death camp in southern Poland.
Thousands of Auschwitz prisoners perished at the wall, grey and still riddled with bullet holes. Adorned with flowers, it is a stone’s throw from the infamous wrought iron “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free) gate at the camp’s entrance.
Imams from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States offered traditional Muslim “salat” prayers facing south towards Makkah, shoes removed.
The emotional visit was part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-genocide programme organised in part by the US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom.
Of the 6mn Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, 1mn were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.
Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide against an estimated 10mn European Jews.
Once Europe’s Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90% of its 3.3mn pre-war Jews wiped out under Nazi German occupation between 1939-45.
Some of the imams wept at an emotional meeting on Tuesday with Jewish Holocaust survivors and their Polish Catholic saviours who told stories of their war-time sacrifice and survival at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue.
Earlier on Tuesday, the group visited the Polish capital’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in the heart of city’s pre-war Jewish community which became the infamous Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis.