This undated file photo shows the main gate of the Auschwitz death camp complex in occupied-Poland. (Associated Press)
A large number of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz will gather next week under an expansive tent, surrounded by royalty and heads of state, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of those held there at the end of World War II.
"This will be the last decade anniversary with a very visible presence of survivors," said Andrzej Kacorzyk, deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which encompasses the sites of the original concentration camp, near the center of Oswiecim, and the larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau on the city's outskirts.
At the 60th anniversary, 1,500 survivors attended. This year, on Tuesday, about 300 are expected. Most of them are in their 90s, and some are older than 100.
"We find this to be a moment of passage," Kacorzyk said. "A passing of the baton. It is younger generations publicly accepting the responsibility that they are ready to carry this history on behalf of the survivors, and to secure the physical survival of the place where they suffered."
A preliminary list of those attending includes President François Hollande of France, President Joachim Gauck of Germany and President Heinz Fischer of Austria, as well as King Philippe of Belgium, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark. The U.S. delegation will be led by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia said he would not attend because his schedule was too crowded and because he had not received an invitation. Museum officials said no head of state had received one. Putin had attended the 60th anniversary ceremony in 2005 - it was Soviet troops, after all, who liberated the camp in 1945 - but relations between Russia and Poland have soured over the conflict in Ukraine.
Previous commemorations had been held outside, Kacorzyk said, but it can be very cold in Poland in late January. The remaining survivors will be among about 3,000 dignitaries who will keep warm beneath a tent large enough to enclose the entire redbrick gateway building to Auschwitz II and its peaked tower, familiar from many films as a symbol of Nazi atrocities.
"Auschwitz is important because it was ground zero of what the Nazis did," said Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a major contributor to the preservation of the museum complex. "And it is important because anti-Semitism is like a virus. You think it goes away, but then it's coming back. Right now, it is coming back very strongly."
President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland will open the ceremony, and Lauder will deliver a short speech. But most of the speakers at the memorial event will be survivors, telling their own stories.
"I was there from September of 1944 until the end," said Ryszard Horowitz, a photographer now living in New York who was 5 when Auschwitz was liberated. "I remember several scenes from the end. I know we were, at one point, lined up to be killed, just before the liberation, when one of the SS people arrived screaming that the Russians were coming, so they just dropped everything and ran and left us."
Horowitz said he would not attend this year's ceremony.
"I went there twice after the war," he said. "Once, when I was quite young, and then I went back during one of my return trips to Poland in the 1970s. That was enough for me. I do not want to go back."
His sister, Niusia Karakulski, who also survived the camps, will represent the family at the event.
This year's anniversary also coincides with a shift in the way the site's administrators conceive of their mission. From now on, they said, the site will be organized to explain to generations who were not alive during the war what happened rather than to act as a memorial to those who suffered through it.
A foundation has been raising money for a new wave of preservation. There will be new exhibition halls, and a visitor's center will be built in the camp's former meat processing and dairy site. A theater used to entertain Polish troops during the war will become an education center.
Until now, the faces and stories of the Nazi commanders and soldiers were nowhere to be seen.
"The people who lived through it knew their faces and did not want to see them," said Pawel Sawicki, chief spokesman for the museum.
But new visitors, who grew up after the war, need to hear that side of the story, too, he said, and to see the faces of those responsible.
Displays have focused on demonstrating the huge scale of the murders at the camps - giant piles of eyeglasses and battered luggage and mountains of human hair. Those will remain, but they will be augmented by more individual stories, Sawicki said.
"But the biggest and most urgent issue is the brick structures at Auschwitz II," he said. "They are disintegrating, and if we don't do them now, they will be lost."
There are 30 barracks, two disinfection buildings, 10 latrines and wash houses, two kitchens, and one warehouse arranged in a grid within the barbed-wire perimeter of Auschwitz II. The project to preserve them, just underway, will take 15 years.
In a gleaming laboratory, scientists bent over magnifying glasses the size of dinner plates and stirred chemicals in glass containers, trying to determine the exact makeup of the bricks that had been used in each structure.
"We learn as we go," said Anna Lopuska, one of the preservationists, poking at a shard of brick.
Museum officials determined that a fund of 120 million euros ($136 million) was needed to pay for this new wave of work and future efforts. As of late last year, 102 million euros had been raised.
Museum officials hope to be able to announce, during next week's ceremony, the names of 18 "pillars of memory," individuals who have agreed to donate 1 million euros each to complete the drive.
"It is very hard to pass the baton to a new generation, people who are living in different circumstances in a new century," Lauder said. "Your parents may want to pass the torch to you, but it is hard to take up the cause of their life. And in many cases now, we are talking about the grandchildren of survivors."
But perhaps, he said, the outbreaks of anti-Semitism across Europe will help galvanize these new generations.
"When the war was over, everybody was convinced it would be the end of war and of anti-Semitism," said Milan Salomonovic, 81, who spent several weeks in Auschwitz as a young man.
Salomonovic has returned to the camps from his home in Prague many times, often leading groups of college students. He says he will be under the tent to witness next week's ceremony.
"People simply have not learned the lesson of Auschwitz," he said.