German chancellor Angela Merkel sits beside Holocaust survivor Naftali Furst, right, during the opening of the exhibition 'Survivors - Faces of Life after the Holocaust' at the former coal mine Zollverein in Essen, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. The industrial world heritage landmark Zollverein shows 75 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, 75 portraits of Jewish survivors, photographed in Israel by German artist Martin Schoeller. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

(AP) – Seventy-five years after the killing stopped at Auschwitz, the survivors still bear witness, and many observe the rising hatred and anti-Semitism in the world today with a sense of deep disquiet.

Ahead of commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army, Associated Press reporters and photographers visited survivors in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia, the United States and Israel. Many posed showing the blue tattoos still imprinted on their arms, lifelong testaments of their suffering and loss — one of many ways they continue to warn new generations.

Today, the survivors are mostly their 80s and 90s. The youngest was only two when the camp was liberated: Eva Umlauf is 77-years-old and still a practicing psychotherapist in Munich. She will be among hundreds traveling from countries around the globe where they settled after surviving the Holocaust to attend the ceremony at Auschwitz next Monday, exactly 75 years after the Jan. 27, 1945, liberation, though some are too frail to leave their homes to attend.

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of concentration and extermination camps that Nazi Germany built across Europe. It was operated in occupied Poland, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, and at the heart of a railway network that allowed the Nazis to easily transport Jews there from elsewhere across the continent.

The old and infirm were quickly shuttled to their death, often through the iconic watchtower entrance to Birkenau, while those still deemed well enough to serve the Nazi war machine were shepherded through the pathway where the cynical “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign was placed, promising that “work sets you free.”

It didn’t. They were tattooed, hosed down, sheared of their hair and put to slave labor. Provided little clothing or food, they were rammed into cramped barracks locked in behind barbed wire fences. Most withered away before ending up in the crematoria or marched off to their deaths elsewhere as the allies closed in and liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, a date the United Nations has since acknowledged as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In all, the Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, in a meticulous German effort to rid Europe of its Jews in a plan dubbed the “Final Solution.”

Overall, the Holocaust claimed 6 million Jewish lives, wiping out a third of world Jewry.

Mordechai Ciechanower, a 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor living in Ramat Gan, Israel says he survived his nearly two years in the camp thanks to his roofing skills and the generous help of others.

“I died hundreds of times, but kept getting up,” he said. “I never thought I would get out of there, let alone live this long.”

The widowed Ciechanower now has six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, and the walls of his apartment are packed with plaques acknowledging his service for leading delegations to visit former concentration camps.

He is not alone in devoting himself to Holocaust education. Many survivors still speak to young people and volunteer in Holocaust museums.