The commemoration of 77 years since the liberation of the Buchenwald Nazi death camp took place near the central German city of Weimar on Monday.
Marking the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 by American troops, the event was attended by 16 survivors of the concentration camp, including 96-year old Anastasia Gulej from Ukraine, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine.
Gule, a survivor of Buchenwald and also Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, fled Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia and is living in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
It is a “disgrace [that] survivors of the Shoah, of all people, now have to suffer like this again at the end of their difficult lives,” said Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, at the ceremony.
Schuster noted that today “we witness war crimes and feel powerless” and that “we see again in the world – and currently not far from us – what man is capable of.”
He added that the ceremony to remember the liberation of the death camp was “connected with the promise not to remain silent about today’s injustice.”