World marks 77 years since liberation of Auschwitz

Holocaust survivors and officials were set to gather for ceremonies in southern Poland on Thursday to mark the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A photo made available by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum shows the unloading ramp and the "'Gate of Death" at the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp in southern Poland in the winter of 1945.

Photo: EPA/STANISLAW MUCHA/www.auschwitz.org

January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day as proclaimed by the United Nations in 2015.

The ceremonies at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were expected to be a low-key event due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex and a group of foreign diplomats posted in Poland were scheduled to attend, together with 20 surviving former prisoners.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945. It was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and death camps during World War II.

More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished there before the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945.

Agnieszka Bielawska has this report.

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