President andrzej DUDA
Honourable Survivors, Witnesses of the Holocaust!
Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen!
"A train has just arrived at the unloading ramp. People started to get off the freight wagons and walked towards the grove. [...] When I got up in the morning to wash the floor, people were walking [...]. Women, men and children. [...] I went out at night in front of the block - in the darkness the lamps over the barbed wire were shining. The road lay in the darkness, but I could clearly hear the distant hubbub of thousands of voices - people were walking and walking. Fire rose from the woods and lit up the sky, and with the fire, a human cry rose. [...] For days and nights, people were walking [...]. The wagons were constantly coming up to the ramp and - people were walking on".
This is how Auschwitz was described, in the summer of 1944, by the Polish prisoner of the camp, writer Tadeusz Borowski. Crowds of people walking, led, driven to mass death. We, in Poland, know well the truth about what was happening here since it was recounted to us by our compatriots who had camp numbers tattooed on their bodies by Germans.
Seventy-five years have just passed since the end of that monstrous, horrendous, criminal nightmare which was unfolding in this place for almost five years. It has been three generations since that day, the 27 January 1945, when a few thousand prisoners – exhausted with the cruelty of the perpetrators, with slave work, hunger and disease – lived to see the liberation by the soldiers of the Red Army.
We have here with us today the last living Survivors, who have endured the hell of Auschwitz. The last of those who saw the Holocaust with their own eyes. And among them those who experienced the fate of the Jewish Nation as referred to in Psalm 44: "we are killed all day long, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered".
We have come here together – members of 61 delegations from all over the world – to commemorate jointly the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We are standing in front of the gate leading to the camp which claimed lives of the biggest number of victims and which has become the symbol of the Shoah. We pay tribute to all the six million Jews murdered in this and other camps, in the ghettos and places of torture.
Stajemy tutaj przed Wami, Czcigodni Ocaleni, aby w obliczu Świadków Zagłady podjąć raz jeszcze zobowiązanie – z myślą o tych, którzy zginęli, o Was, którzy ocaleliście, i o przyszłych pokoleniach.