67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Remarks by Bronisław Komorowski, President of the Republic of Poland

The Organizers of and Participants in
the observances of the sixty-seventh anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp and extermination center

Esteemed Former Auschwitz Prisoners,
Esteemed Authorities and Residents of the
City of Oświęcim and the Oświęcim Area,
Dear Participants and Guests at the Ceremony,

I join with all who have gathered during the observances of the sixty-seventh anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and extermination center. I bow my head before the former prisoners in attendance at the ceremonies. You are living witnesses to the “epoch of the furnaces,” people whose dramatic experiences should penetrate the consciousness of each generation in Poland and all around the world.

The Red Army units entering the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in January 1945 found fewer than eight thousand people behind the barbed wire. Retreating German formations harried many times more on the brutal Death Marches into the depths of the Third Reich and the territories it occupied—and, ultimately, to other camps including Mauthausen. From January 27, 1945, the world began grappling with the horrific truth about what happened in Auschwitz—a truth that it had earlier been unwilling or unable to believe, which it did not want to admit to its awareness.

Since that time, decades have passed. It might seem that everything has already been said, that all the mourning has been lived through and all the grief exhausted. That is only true up to the moment when we find ourselves on the grounds of the camp. Then it hits us with all its force that the heart of darkness of World War II was right here, that the evil of Nazism revealed itself in its fullest ruthlessness here. Murder that did not spare pregnant women, children, and the elderly, the killing of thousands of innocent people with gas, the backbreaking labor, the cruel pseudo-medical experiments conducted on camp prisoners—the actions of the Nazi criminals revealed itself in all the iniquity that human beings are capable of inflicting on other human beings. That is why an obligation to confront questions about Auschwitz is inscribed in the human condition after 1945. We have no right to turn away from this place, no right to think that studying this history has become unnecessary. Auschwitz will always prick the conscience of every thinking, feeling person. It will remain a wound on the soul of Europe and the world.

Auschwitz is also an admonition, the most striking of all that history offers us. An admonition against hatred in its private and public dimension. An admonition against racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Against totalitarian rule built on oppression and lies. An admonition against every ideology that regards it as permissible to forget about morality, about empathy, and about respect for human beings and their rights and dignity. Here in Auschwitz, under the sign of the swastika and in the name of that ideology of theirs, the German perpetrators deprived people of their dignity in a systematic, refined way. They abased them, stripped them of hope, and plundered their names. Nothing except the number branded on the arm was supposed to remain of the unique individuality that is each person.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Republic will never forget the victims of Auschwitz—above all because a significant proportion of them were its children: Polish Jews, Poles, Polish Roma. But also because, in setting up this extermination center, the German occupier dealt a horrific blow to our homeland. On the soil that for hundreds of years had prided itself on its reputation as a haven for the persecuted, a shelter for dissidents, and a country without burning at the stake, the invader erected a stake to burn more than a million people from all over Europe. We shall remember all those people who suffered death at German hands on the soil of our homeland.

We will also steadfastly oppose all attempts at relativizing historical facts, falsifying them, and explaining as “mental shortcuts” such expressions as “Polish concentration camps.” We will steadfastly oppose such things out of a sense of elementary fairness, but also because, as a nation of victims of Hitler, we understand the remembrance of the Nazi crimes committed against Poles, Jews, Roma, Russians, and other peoples of the world as our obligation. We convey this remembrance to succeeding generations. The cry that rises from this place to the gate of heaven will never fall silent. Each of us must understand that the former Nazi German concentration camp and extermination center Auschwitz Birkenau will forever remain an unparalleled admonition. All honor to those who were murdered!