President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova attended the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the suburbs of the Polish city of Oswiecim, near Krakow.
In a statement to the media, President Siljanovska-Davkova assessed that the commemoration attendance in Auschwitz is an opportunity for a collective epiphany and awareness of the gravity of the evil committed. The remembrance of the Holocaust is crucial for it never to be repeated.
“There must be no child, young person, adult who does not know about the Holocaust. There must not be, because sometimes memory, if not nurtured or nourished, can disappear, or it can be twisted into something else. Everything starts with problematizing, first the numbers, then the processes and events, and in the end someone might think that evil can be erased. No, no evil should be erased, no evil should be forgotten”, the President said.
The President also recalled the tragic fate of the Macedonian Jews, who ended up in the Treblinka camp, and called for the establishment of a tradition of organized visits to the camp.
“They are part of our identity and we need to establish a tradition of visiting Treblinka to pay tribute to them, so that respect becomes part of something that we will practice and remind, saying that not only do we not believe that such a thing will happen, but we will show that while we are alive and those after us never and no one must allow such a thing to happen again.
The commemoration at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum began with welcoming speeches and testimonies from survivors, while the President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, and the Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Piotr Cywinski, addressed the commemorative event.
By reading prayers and lighting candles, those present paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust in front of a freight train wagon, placed in front of the main gate of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, as a symbol of the anniversary.
As part of the commemoration, a special musical program was organized, in which prominent musicians, composers, pianists and conductors from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, of Jewish origin, performed.
The commemorative event, which took place on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was attended by about fifty heads of state and government from around the world, high-ranking government officials, representatives of international organizations, as well as Auschwitz survivors.
Auschwitz today is synonymous with the Holocaust, terror, genocide and the crimes of World War II. The German Nazis killed about 1.1 million people in this camp, mainly Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and people of other nationalities. In 1945, soldiers of the Red Army of the Soviet Union liberated about seven and a half thousand survivors from Auschwitz.
