Holocaust survivor says she celebrates the liberation of Auschwitz 80 years ago as if it were her second birthday
Fifty surviving prisoners, political leaders from many European countries, and hundreds of other people marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland on 27 January. The memories of the horrible fates of people whose lives were ended during the Second World War by the Nazi extermination machinery, as well as warnings that antisemitism is spreading, were heard right at the gate to the former camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Those attending the ceremony all agreed that this was one of the last anniversaries during which survivors will still be able to speak about the tragedy of the Holocaust. Inside the tent that was erected over the Auschwitz gate, which opened before the ceremony started, Britain’s King Charles III, Czech President Petr Pavel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with eyewitnesses to this history and their loved ones, as well as with descendants of the victims.
“Few people lived to see their freedom. Now just a handful of them remain,” 98-year-old Marian Turski said during the opening of the ceremony.
The Polish historian, one of the surviving Auschwitz prisoners who is still alive today, told the statesmen present that European countries must not just deal with the problems of today, but with what will happen several years or even decades from now. “We bear the burden of responsibility for millions of victims who never told us what they were feeling,” Turski said from the podium next to a German freight car, a symbol of the transports which brought Jews and others from the ghettos to the death camps.
According to historians, between 1940 and 1945 roughly 1.1 million people, most of them Jewish, but also Romani people, Soviet prisoners of war and others, were murdered in the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp. The prisoners at Auschwitz included 50,000 Czechoslovak citizens, of whom about 6,000 survived.
The Nazis murdered six million people of Jewish origin during the Second World War. “I thought it was normal that if you’re a Jewish child you simply have to die. I didn’t even know what Jewishness was,” Tova Friedman, an American born in Poland, recalled her childhood in Auschwitz, when she lived through the liberation of the camp at the age of six.
Friedman described the daily fear that it would be her turn next after many of her fellow prisoners were murdered by the Nazis, describing how she obeyed her mother and managed to hide the tears which sprang to her eyes from the guards. She said she had no idea the Warsaw Uprising had happened, nor that the Allies had landed at Normandy, nor that the war would soon turn around.
The liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January is now a day that Friedman celebrates as if it were her birthday, because she was reborn on that day. “Eighty years after the liberation of this camp, the world is again in crisis,” she declared, referring to the antisemitism, extremism and fear that are spreading not just in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world.
Just like the other speakers, the head of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, warned against the spread of antisemitism and hateful opinions. “Young people get most of their information from social media and that’s dangerous,” warned the American entrepreneur and philanthropist, referring to the uncritical reception of manipulative information.
The statesmen present listened to the eyewitnesses and gave no speeches of their own. The ceremony lasted more than two hours, and after prayers were read by the representatives of various religions, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, more than 50 statesmen proceeded to bow their heads to the memory of the victims and light a candle in front of the freight car symbolizing the transports.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country has been defending itself against Russian aggression for almost three years now, stepped forward to light his candle, loud applause could be heard from many of the Auschwitz survivors.
Czech President Petr Pavel: It is necessary to commemorate the Holocaust and its victims so history will not repeat itself
Some politicians expressed their views on the legacy of Auschwitz and the Holocaust prior to the ceremony. Czech President Petr Pavel, speaking in an interview with Polish television, said it is necessary to commemorate the Holocaust and its victims and that if we were not to do so, something similar could happen again in the future.
Pavel called the Holocaust probably the worst case of genocide in history. “If we were to no longer commemorate what happened, how it happened, what led to it, we would probably end up in a position whereby we would experience that history once again,” Pavel said.
In the interview, Pavel called for people to stay vigilant for signs of hate speech or freedom of speech being erroneously interpreted as making room for the spread of hate speech. Today it is possible to see examples of incitement to negative positions in society or efforts to divide it, he said.
“If anybody abuses their democratic rights anywhere in the world to attack groups of people, to create a hateful atmosphere, we should take immediate action. If we remain inactive, if we don’t stand up to such behavior, it will very likely continue and grow into something bigger,” Pavel said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said the Poles on whose occupied territory German Nazis built the camp are the “guardians of memory”. The British King declared that commemorating the horrors of the past is an “essential task” that aids with “forming the future”.
Germany was represented at the ceremony by both Chancellor Schulz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), this is the first time Berlin has sent both highest state representatives to an Auschwitz commemoration.
The DPA reports that Germany is showing it continues to take responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime, even at a time when the ultra-right is growing stronger in Germany and does not want these commemorations to happen.
