Auschwitz Survivor Dies on 67th Anniversary of Camp’s Liberation

Sixty-seven years after the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau were liberated by Soviet troops in the Polish village of O?wi?cim, a prominent survivor of the camps has died at the age of 91.

Kazimierz Smolen was a young man- in his early twenties- when the camps were liberated on January 27th, 1945, on what would later become International Holocaust Memorial Day. By 1947, the site had been converted to a museum to mark the horrific acts that had been committed within its gates and outside, and still notably bore the legend “Arbeit macht frei (loosely translated to “work frees you”) over Auschwitz’s entrance. The town of O?wi?cim- renamed to Auschwitz by the Nazis after it was taken over to build the death camp- was where Smolen was imprisoned and survived, and he later came to be a director of the memorial site first started in 1947.

Smolen served as director at the Auschwitz memorial from 1955 through 1990, but remained a prominent member of the local community after his retirement. A Catholic, Smolen was dragged off to the camps after assisting in the anti-Nazi resistance in the early part of the war, attributing his survival to a combination of “extreme” luck as well as being in good health during the time he was imprisoned. Later, he spoke of why he made the difficult choice to return to Auschwitz for so long and manage the memorial, and Smolen explained:

“Sometimes when I think about it, I feel it may be some kind of sacrifice, some kind of obligation I have for having survived.”

In O?wi?cim, survivors gathered at Auschwitz to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day, and a moment of silence was observed to mark Smolen’s death. (Below is a clip of a survivor of Auschwitz- not Smolen– who later returned with his grandchildren to the camps, dancing to “I Will Survive.”)