Holocaust commemoration: Auschwitz survivor: If you oppose conspiracy myths

The gatehouse, the notorious symbol of the German extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, is illuminated red. In front of it is an old freight wagon. With such cars, the Nazis had their victims shipped here in World War II. A huge tent spans around the gatehouse and wagon. The audience at the commemoration – including crowned heads as well as heads of state and government – sits on the right and left of the railway tracks.

The memorial chose this framework on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the German concentration and extermination camp. Delegations from 56 countries have traveled to Poland, Germany is represented with Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

As a child in hell from Auschwitz

But there are no politicians this time. Those who survived the hell of Auschwitz have the word. What these upgraded people tell, makes you shiver more than 80 years later.

“I was as big as the German shepherd dogs, I could look at them when I arrived in Auschwitz,” said the surviving Tova Friedman, who was deported to the camp with her mother as a child at the age of five and a half years. The little girl became a witness how Jewish children were sent directly to the gas chamber from the barrack next door. “I thought: this is normal. If you are Jewish, you have to die.”

Warning of conspiracy myths

The survivor Leon Weintraub (99) described how he was shaved, treated with burning disinfectant on arrival in the camp, treated with burning disinfectants and dressed in rags. “This was how our being was human. We were disposable objects”.

When he sees today that in Poland and many other countries people marched with Nazi slogans, then it worried him very much, said Weintraub. His appeal to young people: “Be sensitive to any manifestation of intolerance or hostility to people of other skin color, religion or sexual orientation.”

The Auschwitz-survivor Marian Turski (98) also warned of conspiracy myths. “We should not be afraid to counter conspiracy theories, according to which everything bad in the world is a result of conspiracies that are called to be found in society by unspecified groups, and Jews are often mentioned here.”

Steinmeier reacts to Musk

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also made a connection to the present. What happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other German concentration camps under the Nazi rule, “this is part of our history and thus also part of our identity, with which we have to deal with,” he said when visiting the former camp, in which between between In 1940 and 1945 more than a million people were murdered – especially Jews.

He also reacted to a statement by the US billionaire Elon Musk, who had criticized the weekend in a video message for an AfD election campaign event that Germany was “too much focus on past guilt”. When asked about this, Steinmeier said in Auschwitz: “I don’t think Mr. Musk is waiting for my advice. But my conviction remains: responsibility knows no conclusion.” Whoever thinks that one can now make a line underneath, he recommends that “to come here now and to find the conversation with survivors”.

Steinmeier to the asylum debate: “Dignity of man inviolable”

At the teachings from Auschwitz for the current asylum debate in Germany, Steinmeier referred to the Basic Law, which was an answer to the Nazi rule. “And this answer is one that embodies itself in Article one of the Basic Law, according to which human dignity is inviolable.”

Steinmeier, together with Scholz (SPD), Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens) and Federal Council President Anke Rehlinger (SPD), took part in the ceremony for the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The land of the perpetrators has never been represented at such a commemoration.

Auschwitz-Birkenau symbolizes the Holocaust and the horror of National Socialism. Around 1.1 million people were shot here between 1940 and 1945, murdered in gas chambers or died of hunger and illnesses – most of them were Jews. On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers reached the camp in Poland occupied by the Wehrmacht and liberated about 7,000 survivors.

Putin excluded – greeting from Moscow

In addition to Poland’s head of state Andrzej Duda, France President Emmanuel Macron and the Canadian head of government Justin Trudeau, British King Charles III also took. And the Ukrainian President Wolodymyr Selenskyj participated in the commemoration. A head of state was undesirable: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was the third time in a row that the commemoration took place without a representative of Russia. On the 60th anniversary of the liberation in 2005, Putin was still a much -noticed guest – also with a view to the role of the Soviet army, who freed the prisoners in 1945.

This is exactly what Putin pointed out in a statement from Moscow. It was the Red Army that revealed humanity the truth about the crimes of the Nazis, it was said in a letter to Putin on the Holocaust Memorial Day.

USA and Israel not represented highly rank

The governments of the United States and Israels in Auschwitz were not particularly high. Unlike originally expected, US Vice President JD Vance did not come to Poland. The US delegation was headed by the Middle East representative Steve Witkoff and the designated Minister of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Only Education Minister Joav Kisch came from Israel.