Auschwitz Victims Remembered at Commemoration in Ljubljana
A remembrance ceremony was held in Ljubljana on Sunday to mark the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, with the key-note speakers pointing out that the memory of the horrors of this camp, which is estimated to have caused the deaths of more than 1.5 million people, is fading away all too quickly.
According to poet and scholar Ciril Zlobec, the world is quickly forgetting about the suffering in this camp as our society is kneeling down before the dictate of capital, recognising it as the world's only true force.
Zlobec said that the Auschwitz experience should be "a lesson to all future generations" and that the civilised world should treat with contempt those claiming that these crime did not happen.
"We believed that this experience would bring humanity to its senses," Cvetko Kobal, a Slovenian Auschwitz surviver told STA.
Fani Racek, who spent 14 months in Auschwitz, meanwhile said that "the memory remains alive", because "this is impossible to forget".
Sonja Vrscaj, addressing the ceremony as a representative of the inmates, said that Slovenia should join the observance of 27 January as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
When the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland was liberated on 27 January 1945, bodies of 600 prisoners were found there. The soldiers saved 7,650 survivors, among them 21 Slovenians, according to the Slovenian association of veterans.
According to Vrscaj, 2,432 Slovenians were deported to Auschwitz and more than half died there.
The first Slovenians deportees, a group of 22, arrived in the camp on 28 September 1941. The biggest Slovenian group of 333 women and 118 men was brought to Auschwitz on 10 August 1942 from the city of Celje.
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