World Marks 80th Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary

The world observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by Soviet troops in 1945. The annual commemoration, established by a United Nations General Assembly resolution in 2005, honors the six million Jews and millions of others, including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.

At the Auschwitz site in southern Poland, now a memorial and museum, Holocaust survivors and visitors laid wreaths and flowers at the execution wall, where thousands were shot by German forces. Poland's President Karol Nawrocki attended a ceremony at nearby Birkenau, the extermination complex where an estimated 1.1 million people perished in gas chambers. In Berlin, candles and white roses adorned the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a vast field of concrete slabs symbolizing the scale of the genocide. A candlelight vigil took place in the Czech Republic at the former Theresienstadt ghetto and camp, from which thousands of Jews were deported to death camps. In London, 95-year-old survivor Mala Tribich...