Auschwitz survivors warn of rising hatred

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OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — Auschwitz survivors warned Monday of the rising antisemitism and hatred which they are witnessing in the modern world as they gathered with world leaders and European royalty on the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation.

In all 56 survivors gathered under a huge tent set up over a gate and railway tracks at the site of the former camp. Many participants expect it to be the last major observance with any notable number of survivors given how exhausting it is for a group whose youngest members are in their late 80s. The numbers have already dwindled considerably from the 200 survivors who attended the 75th anniversary event.

Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology ...

https://apnews.com/article/auschwitz-birkenau-80th-anniversary-bd9004cf75e6799394e6f74d14b4a742

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1. What the Soviets discovered on January 27, 1945

In his Holocaust memoir, "The Truce", Italian prisoner Primo Levi recounted his first contact with the Red Army soldiers when Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated.

“The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945,” he wrote. “They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive."

Imprisoned since February 1944 in Monowitz, one of the three camps located in the sprawling concentration camp grounds, Levi witnessed the men's unease as they caught sight of a place that has since become a symbol of Nazi brutality.

“They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene” ...

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250127-liberation-auschwitz-what-soviets-discovered-january-27-1945

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2. Anti-extremism center opens in former house of Auschwitz commandant

... The house, which belonged to a Polish military family before Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, lies next to the site of the former death camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

“My dream, and those of our colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic that comes here takes action to fight extremism and antisemitism wherever they come from,” said Mark Wallace, the CEO of the Counter Extremism Project.

His group bought the house from a private family and is creating the Auschwitz Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization in the house. It opened its doors to reporters on the eve of the anniversary commemorations, showing them the rooms in the three-story house that still need to be renovated ...

https://apnews.com/article/auschwitz-rudolf-hoss-house-21ebb3648d6b91398910af9a347d5d72

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3. The secrets his daughter revealed to me came to life

... She remembers her father as someone who tucked her in at night and would let her go downstairs on Christmas Eve to eat real cookies left under the Christmas tree.

As he masterminded the mass murder of more than a million men, women and children in the camp next door, he would pat the family dalmatians, entertain friends and listen to records on the gramophone as he smoked his favourite cigars ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/auschwitz-holocaust-memorial-day-b2686968.html

[struggle4progress]

4. We Forget the Lessons at Our Peril

... there has been a rise in Holocaust denial and distortion globally. And since then, it has exploded along with various other forms of antisemitism online, on campuses, and in cities worldwide. That antisemitism is widespread is not new. What's new is the accelerant—social media and larger societal issues, such as polarization, assaults on truth, rampant conspiracy theories, a decline in history and civics education, a loss of trust in institutions, and the rise of the far right and far left, all of which create an environment where antisemitism easily flourishes.

Today, the organization responsible for Holocaust reparations, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released its eight-country (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom, United States) Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Index, conducted in November/ December 2023, in which 76 percent of respondents believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today. When the same question was asked in another Claims Conference survey conducted almost seven years ago, the answer was 58 percent.

Nearly one-third of respondents in each country have seen Holocaust denial on Facebook. Across countries, when asked if they had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion while on social media, nearly half (47 percent) of Polish adults said, "yes." In Austria and Hungary this number was 38 percent, in Germany it was 37 percent, in the U.S. 33 percent, in Romania 25 percent, in the U.K. 23 percent, and in France 20 percent ...

https://www.newsweek.com/80-years-later-we-forget-lessons-auschwitz-our-peril-opinion-2020373

[struggle4progress]

5. Memorializing the Holocaust Needs to Go Beyond Auschwitz

... the Holocaust didn’t begin with mass murder. The dehumanization of Jews progressed gradually from public exclusion to eventual internment to finally extermination. Millions of regular Germans—and Europeans more broadly—facilitated or silently accepted these actions.

As Holocaust survivor Marian Turski warned five years ago at Auschwitz, this sort of indifference in the face of discrimination risks people not even noticing when “an Auschwitz-like catastrophe suddenly befalls you and your descendants” ...

https://time.com/7210222/auschwitz-anniversary-holocaust-memorials-future/

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6. Remembering Auschwitz, Fighting Today

In one picture is a pile of lifeless bodies. A group of inmates who are still alive — known as the Sonderkommandos — are being forced to chuck the dead into a fire pit, hidden by a huge cloud of smoke. Another picture shows a group of women, naked, moments before their execution in a gas chamber. To this day, they are some of the only photographic records of the operation of the Auschwitz concentration camps and the lives they claimed.

These photographs were themselves an act of resistance. Hidden and smuggled out of the camp in a tube of toothpaste, the photos were shot by a camera through a hole in the pocket of a prisoner. Another photo can only depict the shadow of some trees. The fact these photos are blurred and slanted, however, does not detract from their power. Far from it — their imperfect composition is proof of the bravery of the people who captured them and the extraordinary measures they took to prevent the Nazis from hiding evidence of their crimes.

These photos, of course, provide only a glimpse of the industrial process of mass murder. No single image can capture the evil of the Holocaust in its entirety. Genocide cannot be reduced to a photograph. However, by helping expose to the world the evil of the Holocaust, these photographs became an enduring piece of evidence in pursuit of the truth.

There is another reason why these photographs are of immense importance: they prove that the unimaginable is imaginable. They make it harder for future generations to forget. And they force us to ask ourselves how humanity could possibly have let this happen ...

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/01/jeremy-corbyn-remembering-auschwitz-fighting-today

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7. The difficult question remains unanswered

... "It was only a short walk from any German city to the nearest concentration camp," says the American voice-over. The camera catches relaxed, smartly dressed Germans laughing and chatting as they make their way.

They walk past the corpses, piles of emaciated men and women, men and women who may even have been their neighbours, colleagues, friends in the past. The camera that had captured their relaxed, easy smiles before they entered the camps now records their horror ...

What was the nature of the moral collapse that turned this horror into a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality in which mass murder became, for them, all in a day's work?

This is a question that has been touched on many times before but even now, some 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, has yet to be fully comprehended ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l0exprq5ro

[Solly Mack]

8. Thank you

K&R