Poland’s OSWIECIM As they met with world leaders and European nobility on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp, survivors of Auschwitz issued a warning Monday about the growing antisemitism and hatred they are seeing in the modern world.
At the location of the previous camp, 56 survivors gathered under a large tent that was erected over a gate and railroad tracks. Given how taxing it is for a group whose youngest members are in their late 80s, many participants anticipate that it will be the final such observance with any significant number of survivors. Compared to the 200 survivors who attended the 75th anniversary event, the numbers had already significantly decreased.
Approximately 1.1 million people were killed by Nazi German forces at the location in southern Poland, which was occupied by Germany during World War II. The majority of the victims were Jews who were mass-murdered in gas chambers, but there were also Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, and others who were singled out for extermination under Nazi racial philosophy.
Marian Turski, a 98-year-old Polish Jewish survivor, urged everyone present to focus on the Holocaust victims, pointing out that the number of people killed was always much higher than the much lower number of survivors.
According to Turski, we have always been a very small minority. And now there are just a few left.
Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide were wiped out by the Nazi government, which killed 6 million Jews in total. Jan. 27 was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the UN in 2005.
A 99-year-old survivor from Lodz, Poland named Leon Weintraub denounced the growing hate, which he attributes to the extreme and anti-democratic right’s more outspoken initiatives. After escaping postwar antisemitism in Poland, he moved to Sweden, where he said he also observes that.
According to physician Weintraub, this ideology, which propagates animosity and hatred toward other people, elevates racism, antisemitism, and homophobia to the status of virtues.
For the first time, Germany’s two top leaders went together: President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz. It demonstrated Germany’s steadfast resolve to face up to its misdeeds, despite the rise in popularity of the far-right party in recent years.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who is in charge of a country that is fighting back against Russia’s violent invasion, was present, along with President Andrzej Duda of Poland, President Emmanuel Macron of France, King Charles III of Britain, and other dignitaries.
The Red Army forces that freed the camp were composed of Ukrainians, much like Russians.
There is still evil in the world that aims to wipe out entire nations. A day earlier, Zelenskyy, who is himself of Jewish heritage, posted on his Telegram page.
At previous commemorations commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of the camp on January 27, 1945, Russian delegates were invited as honored guests. However, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have not been welcomed.
The exclusion infuriated the Russian authorities. In a statement to participants, President Vladimir Putin stated, “We will never forget that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history.”
The World Jewish Congress’s president, Ronald Lauder, urged the leaders present to fight against antisemitism, claiming that Auschwitz resulted from the world’s silence.
The world finally witnessed the gradual development of antisemitism when the Red Army passed through these gates. This is where it leads. The gas chambers. The body heaps. Lauder remarked, “All the horrors within these gates.”
He added that although Adolf Hitler first targeted Jews, by the end of World War II, nearly 60 million people had perished and the continent was in ruins.
The 80-year-old Lauder noted that he had been going to the annual observances for 50 years, but he anticipated that this year’s ceremony would be his final one speaking. “However, I depart from you today knowing that I did everything in my power to be worthy of the memory of all those who perished here,” he added.
Tova Friedman, 86, was another survivor who talked. She was sent to the camp with her mother when she was five years old, and she was six when she was one of the 7,000 individuals freed. She remembered pulling up in a dark cattle vehicle after a long drive. She claimed to be hot, thirsty, hungry, and extremely afraid, and she could still hear the cries of helpless women nearby. Dark smoke and the stink of the burning dead covered the sky when she got at Auschwitz.
Friedman moved to the US after the war, where she had a family and worked as a therapist. She worries that the safe haven that the US provided for Jews in the years following World War II is also being destroyed by growing antisemitism.
One day prior to the observances, she told The Associated Press that the world has turned poisonous. I understand that we are once again in a crisis, that there is a great deal of mistrust and hostility in the world, and that things could get worse if we don’t take action. Another horrible devastation might occur.
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