Survivors of Auschwitz deliver warning from history as memories die out

The number of Auschwitz concentration camp survivors is dwindling, but their voices remain powerful. At the infamous death gate of the Birkenau extermination camp, 99-year-old Leon Weintraub, the oldest of four speakers, said, "We were deprived of all humanity."

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, world leaders and European royals gathered on Monday with 56 survivors of Hitler's genocide against European Jews. Tova Friedman described how, at the age of five and a half, she held her mother's hand tightly and witnessed the horrors of Nazi persecution, saying, "We were victims in a moral vacuum." She also recalled hiding in a labor camp and seeing "all my little playmates rounded up and driven to their deaths, while their parents' heart-wrenching cries went unheeded."

The historical warning is clear: survivors know the risks of intolerance better than anyone, and antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. Under the massive white tent covering the entrance to the death camp, Leon Weintraub specifically called on young people to "be sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment against those who are different." The Nazis killed 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945, nearly 1 million of whom were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 were Roma, 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war, and an unknown number were homosexual men.

Another survivor who spoke was 94-year-old Janina Iwanska, a Catholic who was arrested during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. She recalled how the so-called Nazi "Angel of Death," Josef Mengele, sent all the remaining Roma in the camp to Birkenau to be executed because he no longer needed them for his deadly medical experiments. 98-year-old Marian Turski said that only a few people survived the death camps, and now they are few in number. His thoughts turned to the millions of victims, "who will never be able to tell us their experiences or feelings, simply because they were consumed by mass destruction."

Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz Museum, called for the protection of this historical memory as survivors are gradually passing away. He said, "Memory brings pain, memory provides help, memory guides the way... Without memory, there is no history, no experience, no point of reference." The survivors listened, many wearing blue and white striped scarves, symbols of the prisoners' uniforms. Memory was the theme of the day, which is commemorated worldwide as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged that Poland can be entrusted with protecting the memory of the six death camps within its borders, including Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek, and Chelmno.

"We are the guardians of memory," Duda said after laying a wreath at the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed at Auschwitz I, located 3 kilometers from Birkenau. Far from the entrance to the Nazi death camp, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Secretary-General António Guterres said that "remembrance is not just a moral act, it is also a call to action," and warned that Holocaust denial is spreading and hatred is being fueled around the world. He quoted Italian survivor Primo Levi, who wrote down his memories of the concentration camp for posterity but could not bear the scars of what he had witnessed. In the words of another survivor, Elie Wiesel, Levi "died in Auschwitz 40 years later."

Those who traveled to southern Poland to attend Monday's commemoration of the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz included King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, and King Frederik and Queen Mary of Denmark. Charles III became the first reigning British monarch to visit Auschwitz, and he could be seen wiping away tears as he listened to the four survivors speak. During his visit to the concentration camp, he laid a wreath in memory of the victims. According to sources close to the King, the visit was deeply meaningful to him, with one aide describing it as "a profound personal pilgrimage."

Hours earlier, he said that remembering the "sins of the past" remains a "vital task." During a visit to the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, which he opened 17 years ago, the King stated that the Jewish community in Krakow has "re-emerged" from the ashes of the Holocaust and that building a kinder and more compassionate world for future generations is "a sacred task for us all." Mala Tribich, a 94-year-old Polish-British survivor who was released from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, attended Monday's event in Auschwitz. She told the BBC: "We have seen the consequences of concentration camps, beatings, and hatred. Under authoritarian rule, the education children receive can be incredibly destructive, not only to themselves but to everything around them. Therefore, we must be vigilant about this."

Lord Pickles, the UK's special envoy for post-Holocaust issues and chairman of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, warned that "distortions" are threatening the legacy of the Holocaust and historical truth. After listening to the survivors' accounts inside the tent at Birkenau, he told the BBC, "We are seeing memory being transformed into history," as the possibility of survivors giving further speeches is diminishing. "It's very depressing, and I don't think we are living in a post-Holocaust world," he added. A survey published last week across eight countries showed a widespread belief that another Holocaust could happen again. According to the survey of 1,000 people in each country, concerns are particularly high in the United States and the United Kingdom.