Kazimierz Smolen, Auschwitz Survivor, Dies In Same Town On Liberation Anniversary

Last Updated on Friday, 27 January 2012 13:38 Written by Vanessa Gera / AP Friday, 27 January 2012 13:30

In this Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 file photo, visitors from around the world pass under the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei "Work Sets You Free" sign over the main gate at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz, in Poland. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski,File)

WARSAW, Poland — Kazimierz Smolen, a 91-year-old Auschwitz survivor – who after World War II became director of the memorial site – died Friday on the 67th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

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Smolen passed away in a hospital in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II, said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

Friday is the anniversary of the camp's 1945 liberation by Soviet troops. Jan. 27 was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations in 2005, and marked with ceremonies across Europe.

Two years after the war ended, Auschwitz-Birkenau became a museum – and Smolen himself served as its director from 1955-1990. He continued to live in the town in recent years, often attending the memorial ceremonies marking the camp's liberation.

Sawicki said Smolen's death was announced to Holocaust survivors gathering at the site in subfreezing temperatures shortly after his passing. They fell silent for a minute in his honor.

Smolen was born on April 19, 1920, in the southern Polish town of Chorzow Stary. He was a Pole involved in the anti-Nazi resistance who was arrested by the Germans in April 1941 and taken to Auschwitz in one of the early mass shipments of prisoners there. He left the camp on the last transport of prisoners evacuated by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945, nine days before its liberation. He later attributed his survival to good health and extreme luck.

He once explained his decision to return to the camp to manage it as a way of honoring those who were killed there.

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

In other gestures of remembrance, Turkish state television on Thursday broadcast the epic French documentary "Shoah," about the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime. It was the first time the film has been aired on public television in a predominantly Muslim country.

"It is a historical event," filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 87, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in Paris. "It is extremely important that it is being shown in a Muslim country."

Germany's Parliament also gathered Friday for a special sitting to remember the Holocaust.

Prominent survivor and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki remembered the Nazi SS in a speech to the Parliament, recalling how in July 1942 they informed members of the Warsaw ghetto's Jewish council of plans for the inhabitants' "resettlement" to the east.

Reich-Ranicki, 91, recounted how a "deathly silence" was followed by uproar. He said those present "seemed to sense what had happened: that the sentence had been pronounced for the biggest Jewish city in Europe. The death sentence."

The Nazis set up the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940, cramming hundreds of thousands of Jews into inhuman conditions. Most who survived were transported to death camps. The Nazis burned the ghetto down in April 1943.