Auschwitz survivors warn of rising hatred

[struggle4progress]

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