On Tuesday, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of prisoners of the German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was commemorated. The commemorative ceremonies were attended by the President of the Republic of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who stressed that Germany has still not paid reparations to Poland for the wrongs of the Second World War.
Karol Nawrocki began his visit to Oświęcim by going to the site of the former Polish Tobacco Monopoly, where on 14 June 1940 the Germans placed the first Polish prisoners brought to the then newly established KL Auschwitz. The President laid flowers at the plaque commemorating the first mass transport of Poles and at the monument to Captain Witold Pilecki. He then proceeded to the grounds of the former Auschwitz I camp, where he paid tribute to the murdered at the Death Wall. He also prayed in the martyrdom cell of St. Maximilian Kolbe in Block 11.
The main commemorations, attended by survivors of the Holocaust, took place in a building on the grounds of the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, in the immediate vicinity of the ruins of the gas chamber and Crematorium IV.
“Today, Auschwitz is a symbol and proof of the brutality, barbarity, and the National Socialist ideology that found its home in a specific state, namely Germany. But it is also a symbol of a certain indifference to the death of the innocent, in the course of euthanasia actions before 1939 and after 1939, and of the indifference of Western European states to what was happening in Poland between 1939 and 1941,”
President Nawrocki emphasized.
The President stressed that the world cannot remain indifferent to what happened after 1945. He pointed out that “only 15 percent of perpetrators from the German concentration camps were held accountable for the murders committed here.”
“The German state has still not paid reparations to Poland for the wrongs of the Second World War. This is not how a world of peace is built, for every crime and every war, one must simply pay and apologize. Only then will we be able to feel that we have fulfilled our contemporary duty,”
Nawrocki noted.
See the photo gallery from President Karol Nawrocki’s visit to Auschwitz. The photographs were taken by Mikołaj Bujak from the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland.