Auschwitz Liberation 80th Anniversary to Exclude Political Speeches
The 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation will see a significant change as the museum bans political speeches, allowing a more solemn remembrance of the Holocaust.
Krakow: Primo Levi wrote, just two years after his release from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945: "I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man".
The Jewish Italian writer struggled for the rest of his life with the vast existential questions raised by the moral void of the Holocaust. And as the world prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, the few remaining survivors of the concentration camps are approaching the end of their own lives as new wars make their warnings as relevant as ever.
Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers will be among those who gather in Poland at the largest and most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps, where 1.1 million people - mainly Jews - perished, either from asphyxiation in the gas chambers or from starvation, exhaustion and disease.
But none of them will be let near a microphone, in a first for a major anniversary of the liberation. The Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event, which will mark 80 years since the day Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945.
