With most of them in their late 80s and 90s, the ceremony on Tuesday was likely to have been one of the last large gatherings of Holocaust survivors, who came from at least 19 countries.
Major efforts were made to transport and accommodate the 300 survivors, including a massive heated tent engulfing the Birkenau gatehouse. There was also a clear intention to keep them at the centre of the proceedings, which were televised live and covered by 800 journalists from around the world.
While in past anniversaries, politicians had given long-winded speeches, this year, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski was the only politician to speak. In addition, three survivors recounted both their experiences and the lessons they had learned.
For many years, Jewish organisations had been critical of the fact that while over 90 per cent of the 1.1 million who died in Auschwitz were Jewish, for decades the Jewish identity of the genocide had been airbrushed out of ceremonies. The anodyne title "victims of fascism" was commonly applied to the dead.
In recent years, Polish society has been going through a profound change in its attitude towards its Jews. It is beginning to recognise the loss, not only three million of its Jewish citizens alongside another three million non-Jewish, Polish victims, but also the absence of a community that existed and contributed to Polish life for a 1,000 years.
The selection of the three survivors who spoke at the event reflected this. Two of them were Jewish and another was a Polish political prisoner, Kazmierz Albin. In addition, President Komorowski said the Germans had made his country a giant cemetery for Jews and "ended many centuries of long Jewish presence in our land."
Jewish survivor Roman Kent, today a US citizen and the president of the International Auschwitz Committee, accused "the ideological successors of the perpetrators" who are today "abetted by much of the media in trying to sanitise the Shoah" by obscuring the fact that six million of the victims murdered by the Germans in the Second World War were killed simply because they were Jews.
"It has become routine to use the word 'lost'," he said. But they were not lost, they were "brutally murdered... they did not perish in the normal sense of the word." He said that the lesson for today from the Holocaust is that "no one should ever be a spectator… If I had the power, I would add an 11th commandment - you should never, never be a bystander." He added that "the answer to tyranny is involvement and the courage to make moral choices and act in accordance with those choices."
President Komorowski repeated the controversial claim - which angered the Russian government last week - that the Soviet troops who had liberated the camp 70 years ago were actually Ukrainians. The ongoing tension between Russia and its neighbours, among whom Poland is one of the more critical, was the reason why President Vladimir Putin decided not to attend.
The World Jewish Congress, which was one of the organisers of the event, brought a large number of the 300 survivors and their family members to the event. Speaking at the ceremony, WJC president Ronald Lauder connected the old antisemitism to today's hatred of Jews and Israel in Europe. He said: "For decades, the world has been fed lies about Israel. They say that Israel has no right to exist. We all learned that when you tell a lie three times and there is no response, that lie becomes the truth."
