World leaders in Israel to recall horrors of Auschwitz
Jerusalem, Jan 23 (AFP/APP): Israel hosts dozens of world leaders Thursday to mark 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the World War II death camp where the Nazis killed more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews.
The presidents of Russia, France and Germany, US Vice President Mike Pence and Britain’s Prince Charles will address the sombre event at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem.
Guarded by more than 10,000 police, one third of the Jewish state’s national force, the meeting of over 40 presidents, premiers and monarchs is the biggest international gathering ever held in Israel.
Alongside the host, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leaders will warn against a resurgence of anti-Semitism in speeches at the memorial site for the six million Jews that Nazi Germany killed in gas chambers, ghettos and forced labour camps.
The ceremonies, which will also bring the kings of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands to Jerusalem, move on next Monday to the site in Poland of the Auschwitz camp that was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
While in the Nazi death camps, he said, “a third of the Jewish people went up in flames”.
