At Auschwitz memorial, survivors see echoes of the past in rising antisemitism

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — Auschwitz survivors warned Monday of the rising antisemitism and hatred 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.

Marian Turski, a 98-year-old Polish Jewish survivor, called on those gathered to turn their thoughts to the victims of the Holocaust, recalling that the number of those murdered was always far greater than the smaller group of survivors.

“We have always been a tiny minority,” Turski said. “And now only a handful remain.”

In all, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe's Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Leon Weintraub, a 99-year-old survivor from Lodz, Poland, decried the rising hatred which he blames on “increasingly vocal movements of the radical and anti-democratic right." He said he also sees that in Sweden, where he settled after fleeing postwar antisemitism in Poland.

“This ideology, an attitude that preaches hostility and hatred towards others, defines racism, antisemitism and homophobia as virtues," Weintraub, a doctor, said.

Germany was represented by both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first time that the country's two highest leaders attended. It was a sign of Germany's continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation's crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia's brutal invasion, was among those in attendance, along with Poland's President Andrzej Duda, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's King Charles III and other royalty.

Ukrainians, like Russians, made up the Red Army forces that liberated the camp.

“The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world,” Zelenskyy, himself of Jewish descent, wrote on his Telegram page a day earlier.

Russian representatives were honored guests at the past observances in recognition of the Red Army liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945. But they have not been welcome since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Russian leadership expressed anger over its exclusion. “We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this dreadful, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history," President Vladimir Putin said in a message to participants.

Ronald Lauder, head of the World Jewish Congress, called on the leaders gathered to oppose antisemitism, saying it was “the world’s silence that led to Auschwitz.”

“When the Red Army entered these gates, the world finally saw where the step-by-step progression of antisemitism leads. It leads right here. The gas chambers. The piles of bodies. All the horrors within these gates,” Lauder said.

He also said that while Adolf Hitler's first targets were Jews, by the time World War II was over, “more than 60 million human beings were dead and this continent lay in ruins.”

Lauder, 80, recalled how he has been attending the anniversary observances for 50 years, but now he must be “realistic.”

"This may well be the last commemoration, and also that I will speak at. But I leave today with the understanding that I did my best, I did my utmost to be worthy of the memory of all those who were lost there. ... I hope I was worthy," he said to applause.

Another survivor who spoke was 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was brought to the camp aged 5 with her mother and was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated. She recalled arriving after a long ride in a dark cattle car. She said she was hot, hungry, thirsty and very terrified and still remembers the cries of desperate women around her. When she arrived at Auschwitz the sky was obscured by dark smoke and stench from the burning bodies.

After the war Friedman settled in the United States where she became a therapist and raised a family. She fears that rising antisemitism is also destroying the safe haven that the United States represented for Jews in the postwar era.

“The world has become toxic,” she told The Associated Press a day before the observances. “I realize that we’re in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”

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Associated Press writers Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Credit: AP