Auschwitz without the Russians will be like Hamlet without the ghost

Because of its invasion of the Ukraine, Russia will be barred from a ceremony marking 80 years since the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Monarchs, including Charles 111, will be there on January 27 but no-one of significance from Russia. TREVOR GRUNDY reports –
No Russians of significance will be at the ceremony attended by monarchs, presidents and prime ministers, plus the most important people of all – the handful of Holocaust survivors who lived to tell stories of what the world now calls the most horrendous ever example of man’s inhumanity to man.
January 27 will mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation by Russian and Ukrainian soldiers attached to the Red Army.
Around a million people were killed in the world’s most publicised concentration camp – the majority of them Jews.
The director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum, Polish-born historian Piotr Cywinski, has banned all speeches by politicians.
“There will be no political speeches at all, “he said. “We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on their history, their pain, their trauma and their way to offer us some difficult moral obligations for the present.”
A report in The Guardian by Shaun Walker (January 13, 2025) said that contemporary politics are swirling around the build-up to the ceremony.
Earlier this month, Poland’s deputy foreign minister suggested authorities would be obliged to arrest Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he travelled to Poland for the ceremony, given the International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges.
But the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, rowed back on the threat to arrest Netanyahu, despite the fact that Poland is a signatory to the ICC.
He said: “The Polish government treats the safe participation of the leaders of Israel in the commemorations on 27 January 2025 as part of paying tribute to the Jewish nation, millions of whose daughters and sons became victims of the Holocaust carried out by the Third Reich.”
Shaun Walker wrote: “Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza is only one of the many contemporary events that makes it more complicated to regard the ceremony as simply a gathering of world leaders in quiet commemoration of the 1.1 million people who were killed at Auschwitz, the vast majority of who were Jewish.”
So, clearly the leaders of Poland see a sharp difference between Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza and the Lebanon.
This year, the 80th anniversary of such a soul-touching moment in European history, the Russian leader is the world’s number one pariah.
What tragic irony that representatives of the two countries which liberated Auschwitz in 1945 are unable to join hands in 2025 and in silence and sadness remember what the poet Tennyson called “Old unhappy far off things / And battles long ago.”