Russia not invited to Auschwitz liberation ceremony

Friday will mark the 78th anniversary of the haunting winter afternoon when Red Army troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than a million people (the vast majority of them Jews, but also political prisoners and Roma people) had been murdered.

But the annual commemoration in Oświęcim, Poland, will not include Russian officials, the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum announced on Thursday.

That decision has less to do with the past — never far away in this sorrowful corner of Europe — than with the present.

“Because of the attack on free and independent Ukraine, representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to participate in this year's commemoration event of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer for the museum, told Yahoo News in an email.

Polish President Andrzej Duda will preside over the ceremony, which takes place as fighting continues to rage in eastern Ukraine. Poland has emerged as one of the strongest supporters of its neighbor Ukraine, accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees and facilitating military transfers from the West.

The ruined gas chambers, sparse wooden barracks and other facilities that are toured by some 2.3 million visitors each year are “an eloquent warning to mankind, how eloquent today in light of Russia's war crimes in Ukraine,” the museum’s director, Piotr Cywinski, said when the 78th anniversary ceremony was first announced.

Russia responded sharply. "No matter how our European 'non-partners' contrived in their attempts to rewrite history in a new way, the memory of the Soviet heroes-liberators and horrors of Nazism cannot be erased,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a social media post.

Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz were among the first to be subjected to the Nazi practice of using poison gas to commit mass murder in 1941, before the first of the death camps in Poland opened the following year. Hundreds of thousands of Jews would be murdered there and in a camp that, by 1944, had expanded into a vast labor colony and killing factory known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

No other camp would survive intact, as Nazis sought to hide evidence of their grotesque crimes against humanity.

It was the Red Army’s relentless advance that expelled Hitler’s forces from its conquered lands in Eastern Europe, including Poland, leading to the eventual liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the 322nd Rifle Division of Russia's 60th Army.

It was the Red Army, too, that marched two months later into Berlin. The costs of the triumph were great, with the Soviet Union losing an inconceivable 26 million civilians and soldiers throughout the war. In her post, Zakharova recalled that it was Soviet soldiers who “saved the world from the fascist plague.”

Both American and British authorities had known what had been taking place at Auschwitz, but they had refused to bomb the rail lines that brought thousands of Jews daily from across Europe to their deaths.

Although the Red Army was exceptionally diverse, drawing from every segment of Soviet society, it was most closely identified with its Russian history and core. And though Russia has a long history of antisemitism, its defeat of Hitler relegated that — until the late 20th century — to a background detail.

Victory over Nazism remains central to Russian identity; the conflict is known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to capture the spirit of that time by claiming that he ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “de-Nazify” its ruling regime. Putin’s narrative largely overlooks the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.

To address that fact, some Russian officials have contorted World War II history to fit their narrative, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov citing supposed Jewish complicity in the Holocaust. His comments were denounced as false and antisemitic, precipitating an apology from Putin to Israel’s then-prime minister.

The absence of Russian officials from Friday’s ceremony will prevent a potentially awkward encounter: Slated to attend the event is U.S. second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a successful presidential ticket (his wife is Vice President Kamala Harris)

Emhoff, whose family is from Eastern Europe, is currently touring Holocaust-related sites.