WARSAW, Poland -- Survivors recalled their agony to a world they fear is forgetting, Israel's parliamentary speaker wept in the German parliament and politicians warned of a resurgence of antisemitism on Thursday's International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day falls on the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps where Nazi Germany carried out its Final Solution seeking to murder the Jewish people of Europe.
At the memorial site in Poland, a country subjected to a brutal German occupation during World War II, a small number of survivors gathered in an auditorium. Attendance at the yearly event was sharply curtailed amid Europe's coronavirus surge. Others joined online.
Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others.
Halina Birenbaum, a 92-year-old Polish-born poet who lives in Israel, recalled her suffering remotely. She was 10 when the Germans invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939, and was 13 when she was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau after being led out of the gas chamber of the Majdanek camp thanks to a malfunction.
"I saw masses of the powerful but arrogant army of Nazi Germany as they marched cruelly, victoriously, into the devastated and burning streets of Warsaw," she recalled.
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"The countless experiences of infinite suffering on the brink of death are already a distant, unimaginable story for new generations," she said.
Commemorations everywhere took place amid a rise of antisemitism that gained traction during lockdowns as the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated hatred online.
In recent days alone, a 12-year-old Jewish boy in Italy was attacked and subjected to antisemitic slurs while two men were punched in London.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the London attack "is a terrible reminder, on Holocaust Memorial Day, that such prejudice is not consigned to history, but remains a very real problem in society."
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a virtual U.N. Holocaust remembrance ceremony Thursday that he has made tackling the roots of intolerance an urgent priority.
"Antisemitism, virulent anti-Muslim bigotry, persecution of Christians, racism, and anti-refugee hatred are becoming normalized in a coarsening public discourse -- often amplified in online echo chambers of hate," he said.
About 6 million European Jews and millions of other people were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some 1.5 million were children.
Israel's parliamentary speaker, Mickey Levy, broke down in tears in the Bundestag while reciting the Jewish mourner's prayer (or Kaddish hymn from a prayer book that belonged to a German Jewish boy who celebrated his bar mitzvah on the eve of Kristallnacht, an outburst of anti-Jewish violence in 1938.
Levy said that Israel and Germany experienced "an exceptional journey on the way to reconciliation and establishing relations and brave friendship between us."
In Rome, Pope Francis met Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck, a Hungarian-born writer and poet who survived Nazi death camps and settled in Italy. Both emphasized the "inestimable value of transmitting the memory of the past to the young, even in its most painful aspects, to not repeat the same tragedies." the Vatican said.
In Austria, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid paid an emotional visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where his grandfather, Bela Lampel, was murdered in 1945.
"Grandpa Bela, a quiet man whose family nickname was 'Bela the Wise,' sent me here today to say on his behalf, that the Jews have not surrendered," Lapid said.
He was joined by Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer. The two men hugged each other during the memorial service.
"I apologize, on behalf of the republic of Austria, for the crimes committed here. I apologize that your grandfather was murdered here," Nehammer said.
To tackle Holocaust denial, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress launched a partnership Thursday with the online platform TikTok popular with youngsters. They say it will allow users to be oriented toward verified information when searching for terms related to the Shoah.
According to the U.N., 17% of content related to the Holocaust on TikTok either denied or distorted the Holocaust.
Information for this article was contributed by Geir Moulson, Nicole Winfield, Ilan Ben Zion, Josef Federman, Edith M. Lederer, Sylvia Hui and Llazar Semini of The Associated Press.
Gallery: Holocaust remembered, 77 years later
