World leaders gather for Auschwitz liberation commemoration

World leaders and some 200 survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gathered in  Poland for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
Holocaust Memorial Day is held every year on 27 January. The participants use the occasion to warn about the rise of anti-Semitism and hatred in the modern world.
Some six million Jews and millions of other ethnic minorities were brutally slaughtered during World War II. Hitler’s genocide wiped out two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Around 1.5 million of them were children.
Most of the 1.1 million people murdered at the camp by the Nazis were Jewish, but among those imprisoned there were also Poles and Russians.
Tensions between Russia and Poland are rising over Poland’s role in the war. Putin has previously blamed the Western powers for allying with Hitler, and has citied documents in which, according to him, the Polish ambassador in Germany “expressed full solidarity with Hitler in his anti-Semitic views”.
Last week, world leaders gathered in Jerusalem for a three-hour-long ceremony focused on commemorating the Holocaust and combating rising modern-day anti-Semitism. However, they were criticized for politicizing the event.
“This is about survivors. It’s not about politics”, warned Ronald Lauder, the head of the World Jewish Congress, who organized this year’s event, together with the Auschwitz-Birkenau state memorial museum in Poland.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid his respects at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. He warned about rising hate crimes in France, which increased 27% last year: “That anti-Semitism is coming back is not the Jewish people’s problem: It’s all our problem — it’s the nation’s problem”, he said.
Last month, online store giant Amazon triggered outrage by selling Christmas ornaments decorated with images of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The online store removed the products, after the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland urged it to do so.