The horror stories told by survivors on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation

Only a handful of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors are still alive, but they were on hand on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of most notorious of the Nazi death camps to share their memories.

When the Soviet Red Army troops arrived at the camp on January 27, 1945, they came across around 7,000 remaining prisoners kept in conditions that would subsequently send shockwaves around the world

"We were stripped of all humanity," said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of four who spoke to the crowd gathered by the camp’s so-called Death Gate.

On January 27, 2025, fifty-six survivors were joined by world leaders and European royalty including the UK’s King Charles who was reduced to tears by the harrowing stories being told.

One of the youngest of those liberated that day 80 years ago was Tova Friedman who was just five and a half when the nightmare came to an end.

She told the BBC that she was in bed with typhus at the time and saw the prisoners through a window suddenly all running and wondered what was happening.

Friedman spoke of being “victims in a moral vacuum” and also described the progression of the Nazi persecution which began for her not in Auschwitz but in a labor camp.

It was in the labor camp that she watched in horror from a hiding place as “as all my little friends were rounded up and driven to their deaths, while the heartbreaking cries of their parents fell on deaf ears.”

One survivor spoke of watching children being herded to the gas chambers and believing that it was the natural order of things for all Jewish children to die.

The Nazis murdered in total six million European Jews – murder on an industrial scale never seen before.

Eva Umlauf, 82, who was only two years old when she and her mother were released from the camp, made the journey from Munich to Poland for what is known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, stressing that it was her responsibility to do so.

“They have to know that it’s true. You know, because it’s so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,” she told NBC News.

There is a great deal of consternation that, with the number of survivors dwindling, the world will forget. As King Charles remarked, remembering the "evils of the past" remains a "vital task".

But just two days earlier, tech tycoon Elon Musk was encouraging a crowd of supporters for the rising far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to put the past behind them.

Germany has “too much of a focus on past guilt,” he was reported saying in The New York Times, in reference to the Holocaust.

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything” Mr. Musk said in a short video that was beamed to AfD party members in the eastern city of Halle.

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