Warsaw, Poland - On Monday, world leaders and royals joined them in commemorating the 80th anniversary of the death of Auschwitz, as the global focus will be on the remaining survivors of Nazi Germany's atrocities.

The main observations take place on-site in southern Poland, where Nazi Germany murdered more than a million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Romans and Cindy, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and others targeted for elimination Adolf The goals of Hitler's racial ideology.

Anniversaries evoke great poignancy because of the survivors' advanced age and the realization that they will soon be gone, even as the rising war makes their warnings as relevant as ever.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum said it expected survivors of Auschwitz and other camps to attend an event on Monday afternoon, attended by political leaders and members of the royal family.

In this case, the powerful will sit back and listen to former prisoners while there is still time to hear their voices.

The German authorities invaded Poland in 1940, establishing the Auschwitz concentration camp camp in the Polish town of Oswiecim in 1939. In its early days, it was a camp for Polish prisoners, including Catholic priests and members of the Polish underground resistance movement. The Germans later established around 40 camps in the area, but the most notorious was Birkenau, a sprawling site used for mass killings in gas chambers.

People arriving at Birkenau are taken onto a narrow, windowless cattle train. On the infamous ramp, the Nazis selected people they could use as forced laborers. Others - the elderly, women, children and infants - were left to die soon after their arrival.

In pogroms at Auschwitz and other camps, mass executions in ghettos and close to people's homes, the Germans murdered six million Jews, or two-thirds of all European Jewry.

(On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops arrived at the gates of Auschwitz and discovered approximately 7,000 weak prisoners.

Boris Polevoy, a reporter for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, was the first witness and described an incredibly painful scene: "I saw thousands of Tormented men saved the Red Army - men so thin that they were shaken by the wind, men whose ages it was impossible to guess."

At the time, Allied forces were moving across Europe in a series of attacks on Germany. Soviet troops first liberated the Majdanik camp near Lublin in July 1944 and would go on to liberate Auschwitz, Stutov and others.

At the same time, American and British forces liberated camps to the west, including Buchenwald, Dachau, Mausersen, and Bergen-Belsen.

After Liberation Day, some prisoners died of illness. Many people deal with the grief of murdered parents and children, spouses and siblings. Entire families were wiped out.

"Liberation Day is a very, very sad day for Jewish survivors," Tel Aviv University Holocaust historian Havi Dreifuss said in a recent online discussion about the anniversary.

Today the site is a museum and memorial managed by the Polish State and is one of the most visited sites in Poland. Its mission is to preserve the memory of the objects there and what happened there; it organizes tour guides and its historians to conduct research. In 2024, more than 1.83 million people visited the website.

The museum's challenges were monumental, including efforts to preserve the barracks and other items that were never intended to endure for long. One particularly emotional project involved protecting the shoes of murdered children.

Auschwitz was not only the place where 1.1 million people, 90% of whom were Jewish, were murdered. It also looms large in the world's collective memory as the embodiment of all Nazi crimes, and an example of what hatred, racism and anti-Semitism can lead to.

One of the reasons Auschwitz became a major symbol of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes is that it was also a labor camp where thousands of witnesses could tell the world what happened.

"Relatively large numbers of people survived, and that almost never happened in sites that didn't have this forced labor component, for example," said Thomas Van de Put, a scholar of culture and collective Holocaust memory at King's College London. de Putte said.

As many as 900,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Treblinka starting in 1942-43, with mass killings also taking place at Belzec and other camps, but the Germans tried to cover up evidence of their crimes , there were almost no survivors.

At Auschwitz, the Germans left behind barracks and guards, remnants of the gas chambers, and the hair and personal belongings of those killed there. The "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work will come to you for free) doors are recognized all over the world.

In Birkenau, the rest also remains on the collective conscience. As Van der Putte points out: "You have the gates, you have the wagons. You have a very long railway platform that leads to the former crematorium and the gas chambers."

On Monday afternoon, the president, royal family, ambassadors, rabbis and priests will join survivors in a warming tent set up in Birkenau.

The country, which has expressed remorse for decades of crimes under Hitler, will be represented by Prime Minister Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Also taking part will be the president of Austria, which was annexed by Germany in 1938 and whose dictator Benito Mussolini allied himself with Hitler.

Others taking part included Polish President Andrzej Duda, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Britain's King Charles III, who has long promoted Holocaust commemoration, will also take part along with other European royals, including Spain's King Felipe VI.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was a guest of honor at the 60th anniversary in 2005, a testament to the Soviet Union's heavy efforts in liberating Auschwitz and Soviet troops' defeat of Germany cost.

But he is no longer welcome due to Russian aggression in Ukraine. This will be the third year in a row - without a Russian representative - following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

"This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom. It is difficult to imagine a Russia that clearly does not understand the value of freedom.

The war between Israel and Hamas has also caused excitement over whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should participate. The International Criminal Court, the world's top war crimes court, issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November, accusing him of crimes committed by Israeli operations in Gaza. This means that Poland, as a signatory, will face the obligation to arrest him.

Finally, the Polish government adopted a resolution to ensure the safe participation of Israel's top representatives. However, Israel stuck to its plan to send Education Minister Yoav Kisch.

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Danica Kirka in London and Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.