World leaders and dozens of Holocaust survivors gathered Monday at the former site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.
The ceremony is regarded as the likely last major observance of Auschwitz's liberation that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend, due to their advanced ages.
For the commemoration in Oswiecim, Poland, the U.S. sent a delegation led by Steve Witkoff, President Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, who played a key role in negotiating this month's Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Prior to the ceremony, Poland's President Andrzej Duda remembered the victims of the camp in a television address, saying his country has a special role in preserving the memory of Auschwitz.
"We Poles, on whose land occupied by Nazi Germany the Germans built this extermination industry and concentration camp," said Duda, "are today the guardians of memory."
At the ceremony on the former grounds of Auschwitz, Duda, accompanied by survivors, laid a wreath at the so-called "Death Wall," where shooting executions took place. Some of the survivors wore blue-and-white striped scarves, the colors of the prisoner uniforms they were forced to wear at the camp.
Read more here.
