Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement on Sunday in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day – the 80th anniversary of the January 27, 1945, liberation of Nazi Germany’s concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“We solemnly remember the six million Jews who were systematically murdered across Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as the millions of others who were killed. We honor those who survived, thank the liberators, and renew our shared commitment to human freedom and justice,” Rubio’s statement said.
“This year marks 80 years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust. It may be one of the last years survivors are able to share eyewitness accounts of the horrors they experienced,” he observed.
“As Secretary of State, I will continue my unwavering commitment to support Holocaust survivors and their heirs, just as I did in the United States Senate,” he concluded. Rubio served as a senator from Florida from 2011 to 2025, when he was tapped by President Donald Trump to head the State Department.
The facility at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the Nazi death camps in World War II. There were about 7,000 prisoners held at the camp when it was liberated by troops from the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front – in other words, the Soviet Red Army – on January 27, 1945.
“It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism,” the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum observed in its recollection of the Day of Liberation.
The liberators discovered that retreating Nazi SS forces gunned down hundreds of the prisoners as they fled, and some of the other captives died of exhaustion on the verge of being rescued. The Soviets found the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp by accident after completing an exhausting military offensive, so there was scarce media coverage of the horrifying discovery, and its significance was not immediately understood.
The United Nations established the date of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s liberation as Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005. The establishing U.N. resolution called upon all member states to honor the six million Jews and other minorities who were murdered by the Nazis.
As Secretary Rubio’s statement mentioned, it has long been customary for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum to invite Holocaust survivors to attend its annual ceremony but as the years go by, fewer of those survivors remain. Fifty-six of them came to Auschwitz on Monday; perhaps a thousand remain alive across the world.
Alexander Avram, a researcher at Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Center), told NBC News on Monday his team is racing against time to create a comprehensive “Hall of Names” listing all Holocaust victims before the last of the survivors passes on.
Avram noted that since there were no cemeteries or tombstones for most of the victims, his team is using artificial intelligence to scour millions of pages of contemporaneous documents to find the names of victims. Even A.I. might not be enough to win the race, because so much knowledge of the Holocaust lies in the minds of survivors. Much of that knowledge was never recorded on paper and much of the paperwork was destroyed in the war.
Avram said every name Yad Vashem can recover is “another victory against the Nazis,” because they wanted to “obliterate even the memory” of their victims.
Some of the survivors gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday said they doubted there would be another large gathering of Holocaust survivors, since the youngest of them are now in their 80s.
“We have always been a tiny minority, and now only a handful remain,” said 98-year-old survivor Marian Turski.
The remaining survivors took the opportunity to speak out against anti-Semitism and genocidal hatred. Notably absent from the ceremony at Auschwitz-Birkenau were the Russians, who have not been invited since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” observed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did attend the ceremony.
“We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this dreadful, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a testy message to the Auschwitz-Birkenau event.
