Auschwitz survivors decry anti-Semitism 80 years later

FEW REMAIN A survivor reacts as she pays tribute to victims of the Holocaust during commemorations in Oswiecim, Poland, on Jan 27. —AFP

OSWIECIM, POLAND—Some of the few remaining survivors of Auschwitz returned to the Nazi death camp on Monday, condemning a “huge rise” in anti-Semitism on the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps built by Nazi Germany and has become a symbol of the Holocaust of 6 million European Jews. One million Jews and more than 100,000 non-Jews died at the site between 1940 and 1945.

“Eighty years after liberation, the world is again in crisis,” warned Tova Friedman, 86, adding that “the rampant anti-Semitism that is spreading among the nations is shocking”.

Along with Marian Turski, Janina Iwanska, and Leon Weintraub, Friedman was one of four former prisoners who spoke at the ceremony.

Wall of Death

In total 50 fellow survivors gathered at the main commemoration outside the gates of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, joined by dozens of world leaders.

Earlier on Monday, elderly former inmates, some wearing scarves in the blue-and-white stripes of their death camp uniforms, laid flowers at the site, touching the camp’s Wall of Death in silence.

“Today, and now, we see a huge rise in anti-Semitism and it is precisely anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust,” Turski, 98, warned those at the ceremony.

Weintraub, a 99-year-old Polish-born Swedish physician, asked for the young to “be sensitive” to intolerance and discrimination and condemned the proliferation of Nazi-inspired movements in Europe.

Also speaking at the ceremony, World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder said the horrors of Auschwitz and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were both inspired by “the age-old hatred of Jews.”

Anti-Semitism “had its willing supporters then, and it has them now,” he said.

“On Jan. 27, 1945, when the Red Army entered these gates, the world finally saw where the step-by-step progress of anti-Semitism leads. It leads right here.”

“Today all of us must take a pledge to never be silent when it comes to anti-Semitism or for that matter any other hatred,” Lauder said.

AFP

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