Holocaust survivors fear that Europe is forgetting the lessons of Auschwitz

“Seeing a concentration camp with my own eyes and hearing from a survivor who went through it all really brought it home. This is important for young people like me. Soon we will be able to vote. The far right is gaining more and more support in Germany, and we need to learn from the past.”

Xavier is a 17-year-old German student. I met him at the Holocaust Education Center in Dachau, in southern Germany, just around the corner from the Nazi concentration camp of the same name. He and his classmates spent two days there, learning about their country’s Nazi past and discussing its relevance in today’s world.

Eighteen-year-old Melike admitted that she knew little about the Holocaust before coming to Dachau. Listening to survivor Eva Umlauf talk about what happened touched her heart, she said.

She wished that racism and intolerance were talked about more often. “I wear a headscarf and people often disapprove. We need to learn more about each other so we can all live well together.”

Miguel warned of the rise of racism and anti-Semitism on social media, including jokes about the Holocaust. “It must be prevented,” his 17-year-old friend Ida chimed in.

“We are the last generation that can meet and listen to people who survived that tragedy. We need to make sure that everyone is informed so that nothing like this happens again.”

They are serious and full of hope. Some might say naive.

Here in Europe, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, society seems increasingly divided. There is growing support for political parties, often but not exclusively far-right and ultra-left, that are quick to point to the Other. An outsider. Unwanted. Be it migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people or Jews.

“I want everyone to live together, Jews, Catholics, blacks, whites or whoever,” says Eva Umlauf, a Holocaust survivor who made such an impression on German teenagers.

She describes the Holocaust as a warning of what can happen when superstition takes over.

“So I spend my time talking, talking, talking,” she says. Now in her 80s, she was the youngest prisoner to be freed from the Nazi death camp Auschwitz eight decades ago this Monday. She wrote a book about her experiences and, in addition to her work as a child psychiatrist, she frequently speaks about the death camps and anti-Semitism to audiences at home and abroad.

“Death Mills” is the name of a US War Department film shown to German civilians after the war, edited from Allied footage taken during the liberation of some 300 concentration camps run by the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.

Naked skeletons, with shaved heads and hollow eyes, shuffle and stumble past the camera. One man is gnawing on a disembodied bone, apparently desperate for food. There are piles of corpses in every corner; emaciated faces, forever contorted in open-mouthed screams.

In warehouse after warehouse, you see carefully marked gold teeth, reading glasses and shoes that belonged to the men, women and children who were killed. And bundles of hair shaved from prisoners, packaged and ready to be sold for Nazi profits.

The Nazis used concentration camps and death camps for slave labor and the mass extermination of people they considered “enemies of the Reich” or simply “Untermenschen” (subhumans). These included, among others, ethnic Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, others identified as homosexuals, and the biggest target of all: European Jews.

A total of six million Jews were killed in what became known as the Holocaust. The number was calculated based on Nazi documents and pre-war and post-war demographic data.

The legal term “genocide” was coined and recognized as an international crime after the world realized the scale and dark intent of the Nazis’ mass murders, which continued with fervor even as they lost the war. It refers to actions committed with the aim of total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Auschwitz is probably the most famous Nazi camp. His horrors became a symbol of the Holocaust as a whole. 1.1 million people were killed there, including one million Jews. Most were mass poisoned in gas chambers. Their bodies were burned in huge crematoria. The ash is given to local farmers for use in their fields.

“I was too young to understand much of what happened in Auschwitz,” Eva told the students. “But what my mind has forgotten, my body remembers.”

The teenagers listened attentively. No one was fidgeting or looking at their smartphones as Eva explained that she had the number A-26959 tattooed on her arm in blue ink.

Forced tattooing was part of the “process” for every prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz who was not immediately gassed to death, but instead selected for forced labor or medical experimentation.

“Why did they decide to tattoo a two-year-old child?” Eva asks. She says she finds only one answer to that question: that the “supermen”—the Nazis believed they were creating a superior race—did not consider Jews human.

“We were rats, subhumans, completely dehumanized by this master race. And that’s why it didn’t matter to them whether you were two years old or 80.”

Recounting the trauma she received from her young mother, the loss of all family members before the Holocaust, and the loneliness she felt after the war as a little girl without a grandmother to hug her or bake pies with her, Eva at one point begins cry quietly. Especially when she shows a video of her recent participation in the annual “March of the Living” in Auschwitz, where survivors walk together with young people from all over Europe with the mantra “Never again”.

As they look at her, some of the teenagers in Eva’s audience also have tears rolling down their cheeks.

But a few minutes’ drive from Munich’s Jewish community center, which is guarded by armed police, the acting president of the Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, tells me how concerned she is about the rise of modern anti-Semitism.

Ms. Knobloch, who was born in the early 1930s, remembers holding her father’s hand and watching as Jewish storefronts were smashed and synagogues burned on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in November 1938, when the Nazi regime carried out the massacre. violence against Jews and their property, while most non-Jewish Germans either cheered or looked the other way.

She says that anti-Semitism never completely disappeared after the war, but she did not believe that things would ever become as disturbing as they are now. Even in Germany, she says, which has historically done much to confront its Nazi past and fight anti-Semitism.

This claim is anecdotally supported by members of the Jewish community in Germany and elsewhere who say they are now afraid to wear the Star of David in public and prefer not to have Jewish newspapers delivered to their homes for fear of being labeled a “Jew”. their neighbors.

Research by the UK’s Community Security Trust and the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency says the same. The FRA says 96% of Jews surveyed in 13 European countries report experiencing anti-Semitism in their daily lives.

Jewish communities in South America have also seen a significant rise in anti-Semitism, while in Canada a synagogue was firebombed a few weeks ago and there was also a shooting incident at a Jewish school. In the USA, Jewish graves were desecrated in the city of Cincinnati last summer.

Former President Joe Biden called global anti-Semitism a foreign policy issue. Academic Deborah Lipstadt, who was his special envoy for monitoring and combating it, highlights online anti-Semitism – often alongside Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination – which she says is being manipulated by outside actors such as Russia, Iran and China. to sow division in society and further their own goals and messages.

She also talks about the global rise in anti-Semitism following Israel’s military response in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – following the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Professor Lipstadt says that Israel’s military actions are often blamed on the Jewish people as a whole. All Jews cannot be held responsible for the decisions of the Israeli government, she says. This is racism.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which collects information on anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, cites an incident last month in which a church and town hall in Langenau were graffitied with red letters calling for a boycott of Israel and gassing. The Jews are a reference to the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz and the Holocaust did not start with poison gas. Their roots lay in the European environment of the Jews, which goes back centuries.

The Director General of the Conference of European Rabbis, Gadi Gronic, warns that the attack on minorities is becoming mainstream again. The Muslim community is now bearing the brunt, he says, and also describes himself as shocked by the level of anti-Semitism he sees.

He believes that 80 years after the Second World War, some have deliberately chosen to leave the Holocaust and the responsibility for learning from it in the past.

But the past will not be silenced. Near the Polish city of Gdansk, under the snow-covered leaves that cover the forest floor, the discarded remains of the shoes of the Holocaust victims are still found.

There are soles so tiny, partially buried underground, that their murdered owners must have been small children. The embroidery on some pieces of leather is still clearly visible. Millions of shoes were sent here to a leather factory run by slaves in what was then the Stutthof concentration camp.

The shoes came from the entire territory occupied by the fascists. But mostly, as they believe, from Auschwitz.

“To me, these shoes scream. They shout: we lived 80 years ago!” Polish musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski speaks to me. He is a long-time campaigner to save and display the shoes along with others that are already in the concentration camp museum. The message of the shoes is anti-war and anti-discrimination, Gregor says. And it’s worth hearing.

“These shoes belonged to the people. You know it could be our shoes, right? Your shoes, or my shoes, or my wife’s shoes, or my son’s shoes. This shoe needs attention, not only to preserve it, but also to change ourselves (as people) morally, I was sure that in 2025 things will be very different than now.”

This year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz is considered particularly significant. Perhaps this is the last great anniversary when there will be eyewitnesses and survivors left alive to tell us what happened – and ask us: What do we remember today and what lessons have we clearly forgotten?