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Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers are expected among the attenders at a commemoration event for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz later this month, but none of them will be let near a microphone.
In a first for a “round” anniversary of the liberation, the Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event on 27 January, which will mark 80 years since the day Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945. Only Auschwitz survivors will speak, in what is likely to be the last big commemoration when many are still alive and healthy enough to travel.
“There will be no political speeches at all,” said Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum, in a recent interview with the Guardian. “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,” he added.
Contemporary politics are nonetheless swirling around the buildup to the event, threatening to overshadow the remembrance ceremony. Earlier this month, Poland’s deputy foreign minister suggested authorities would be obliged to arrest the Israeli 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.
The prime minister, Donald Tusk, rowed back on that threat on Thursday, announcing that any Israeli politician, including Netanyahu, could visit the ceremony without fear of arrest, despite the fact that Poland is a signatory to the ICC.
“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,” read a resolution released by Tusk’s office.
Cywiński described the whole discussion as a “media provocation”, claiming there was no indication that Netanyahu had ever planned to visit the ceremony in the first place. He said, however, that a sizeable Israeli delegation was expected at the event.
Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza is only one of 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 whom were Jewish.
In 2005, Vladimir Putin visited the 60th anniversary commemoration, giving a speech in which he said it was “inconceivable to think that people are capable of such barbarity” and paid tribute to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the camp. This time, however, no Russian delegation has been invited.
Cywiński pointed out that both Russians and Ukrainians were among the Red Army troops who liberated the camp, and that the war in neighbouring Ukraine is therefore “a war conducted by one liberator against another”. He said there was no question of any Russian delegation attending in the current climate.
“It’s called the day of liberation, and I do not think that a country that does not understand the value of liberty has something to do at a ceremony dedicated to the liberation. It would be cynical to have them there,” he said.
He dismissed any parallels between Russia’s acts in Ukraine and Israel’s assault on Gaza. “I try not to enter into politics with Auschwitz, and I ask politicians to not enter Auschwitz with politics. But the situation is, of course, absolutely different,” he said. He described the war in Ukraine as “one country attacking an innocent and independent country”, and said Israel’s offensive in Gaza, though “tragic”, was “a country trying to protect themselves from enormous terrorist attack”.
Cywiński, a Polish medieval historian by training, has been in charge of the Auschwitz museum since 2006 and is no stranger to the site being caught up in contemporary events, steering the museum through eight years of government by the rightwing Law and Justice party, during which time Holocaust memory was a frequent political battleground.
Now, he would rather focus on plans to preserve the museum for future generations. Located on the edge of the Polish town of Oświęcim, the memorial is housed in the preserved original buildings of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the ruins of the neighbouring Birkenau extermination camp.
A visit is a harrowing affair, with exhibits featuring more than two tonnes of human hair, piles of suitcases with names written on the side and display cases of everyday objects from people who arrived at the camp thinking they were starting a new life and were then murdered in gas chambers. Official guides provide tours in 21 languages.
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On a visit to the site last year, the Guardian saw how technical and preservation experts are working methodically to ensure the huge and tragic collection of shoes, suitcases, toothbrushes and many other items are catalogued and preserved as best as possible.
Work is also under way to add foundations to a number of brick barracks in Birkenau, buildings that were erected hastily and were not meant to last. “It’s easier to preserve a castle, a cathedral or a pyramid than some very weak buildings built the during the war,” said Cywiński.
The goal is to ensure that the museum will endure as one of the most striking reminders of humankind’s capacity to carry out horrific deeds, a warning that Cywiński feels is more pressing than ever.
“Never before in the postwar period has remembrance been as important as it is now … I think we are at an enormous turning point. Everything’s changed very, very quickly. And those changes are touching very, very deeply some of the most important factors of our civilisation. That’s why I think in these times we need some very tangible points of reference,” he said. Auschwitz should be one of those points, he believes.
Last year, Elon Musk toured the site, after intense criticism over how his X network handles antisemitic posts. Since the visit, however, Musk has only intensified his spread of misinformation on X. Last Thursday, during a live discussion with Musk on the platform, Alice Weidel of Germany’s far-right AfD claimed Adolf Hitler was not rightwing at all but in fact a communist.
While Cywiński declined to discuss Musk specifically, he said that populist politics and hate speech on social media pose a huge threat to contemporary societies. “This is the most important issue of our time … Every wise and hard and difficult proposal expressed by a philosopher or by old-school politicians, will probably lose with the public at large with any stupid, simple populist idea,” he said.
After spending nearly two decades living and working on the site of the 20th-century’s worst crime, it is a situation he feels is exceptionally dangerous.
“You have to remember that between the arrival of Adolf Hitler to power and the start of the second world war, it was just six years. Six years of propaganda. And he didn’t have social media, he didn’t have the internet,” he said.