16 concentration camp survivors on site
The Ukraine war casts a shadow over Buchenwald’s commemoration
04/10/2022 10:23 p.m
Official representatives from Russia were not welcome, but the Russian war of aggression determines the memory of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. 16 concentration camp survivors take part in the commemoration. One of them recently had to flee Ukraine.
Overshadowed by the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, the liberation of the camp on April 11, 1945 was commemorated in the former Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald near Weimar. 16 concentration camp survivors took part in the commemoration, including 96-year-old Anastasia Guley from Ukraine. The survivor of the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen camps fled to Germany after the Russian attack on her homeland and now lives in Saxony-Anhalt.
In his speech, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, described it as a “shame” that “survivors of the Shoah, of all people, are now having to suffer like this again at the end of their difficult lives.” Buchenwald survivor Boris Romanchenko was killed in a Russian bombing raid on Kharkiv in March.
The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation had invited official representatives from Russia and Belarus from the celebration because of the war. Representatives of the Belarusian opposition and the human rights organization “Memorial”, which is banned in Russia, took part.
“Our commemoration is linked to the promise not to remain silent about today’s injustice,” emphasized Schuster, whose father and grandfather were themselves imprisoned in Buchenwald for a while, but were later released and were able to emigrate. Even today it can be seen again in the world what humans are capable of – “and currently not far from us”.
From 1937 until shortly before the end of the Second World War, the National Socialists deported around 280,000 people from all over Europe to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was liberated by US troops. 56,000 died.