forms of extreme hate speech. The remilitarization of relationships between the people desecrates our streets and cities. Brown-shirt like groups profane our streets and cities. Did we really change so much within these two or three generations?"
"What is happening to our world? What is happening to us? Has the memory ceased to constitute a commitment? And if it is hope which dies last, then where else is it to be rooted if not in memory? In a culture which tries to live without being conscious of death, is there still any place for the commemoration of victims?" said Dr. Cywiński.
"We do not want to answer these questions ourselves, it is easier to put them away, ridicule or discredit them. And it does not matter what is happening in Congo, Myanmar or in a neighboring district or stadium," he stressed.
The second part of the ceremony took place at the Memorial to the Victims on the site of the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. The rabbis and clergy of various Christian denominations jointly read Psalm 42 from the Second Book of Psalms, and participants of the ceremony placed grave candles at the monument commemorating the victims of Auschwitz.
Earlier in the day, survivors and the management and employees of the Auschwitz Memorial laid wreaths in the courtyard of Block 11 in Auschwitz I. On the occasion of the anniversary an exhibition was opened in the temporary exhibition hall in Block 12 in Auschwitz I entitled 'Letters...Collection of Władysław Rath'. The exhibition presented a fragment of a large collection of documents related to Auschwitz and the history of World War II, ghettos and other concentration camps. It was created by Holocaust survivor Władysław Rath and handed over to the Museum by his family last year.
Before the liberation of the camp sites by soldiers of the Red Army, German Nazis murdered approximately 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, mostly Jews, but also Poles, the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities. Auschwitz is for the world today, a symbol of the Holocaust and atrocities of World War II. In 2005, the United Nations adopted January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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Opening of "Letters... Collection of Władysław Rath" exhibition