Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland-Even before the gas chambers were destroyed and the savage toll of years of industrialized mass murder revealed to the world, the prisoners of the largest Nazi concentration camp were already repeating two words: never again.
But as the 75th anniversary of liberation I will enlighten approaches, opportunity marked Events around the world and culminating in a ceremony at the former death camp on Monday that will include dozens of Holocaust survivors, Piotr Cywinski, director Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museumhe is afraid.
“Increasingly, we seem to have difficulty connecting our historical knowledge with our moral choices today,” he said. “I can imagine a society that has a very good understanding of history but doesn’t draw any conclusions from that knowledge.”
In this current political moment, he added, that could be dangerous.
All one has to do is look at the backdrop against which this anniversary is taking place.
There is concern across Europe and the United States the revival of anti-Semitism. Toxic political rhetoric and attacks on groups of peoples – using language to depopulate them – once considered taboo, have become commonplace across the world’s democracies.
And as the vivid memory of World War II and the Holocaust fades, the institutions created to protect against the recurrence of such bloody conflicts and such barbarism are under increasing tension.
Even the memory of Auschwitz – where 1.1 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were murdered – has been murdered.
When world leaders converged on Israel Last week’s ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Hillside Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, was overshadowed bitter dispute between Poland and Russia.
After the president Vladimir V. Putin from Russia was offered a speaking role, the President of Poland, Andrzej Dudapulled out when not granted the same privilege.
“Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say this, but President Putin is knowingly, certainly spreading historical lies, and he’s clearly doing it with an agenda, because in this way he’s trying to erase the responsibility of Stalinist Russia for the start of World War II along with Nazi Germany,” Mr. Duda told Israel’s state television. “I imagine he’s ashamed of that today.”
But far from expressing shame, Mr. Putin and his government have been increasingly aggressive in their efforts to envelop the historical record of Soviet negresion in 1939 and the subsequent invasion and subjugation of Poland.
“They were the ones who, following their mercenary and overgrown ambitions, laid their people, the Polish people, open to attack from the German military machine and, moreover, generally contributed to the start of World War II,” Mr. Putin is said to claim.
While Poland is a deeply divided country politically and culturally, outrage over Mr Putin’s remarks is almost universal in the country, as is support for Mr Duda’s decision to boycott the Yad Vashem event.
“It is surreal that a global event dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust is becoming a political affair, a cover for trading history,” said Shevah Weiss, an Israeli political scientist and former president of Yad Vashem. Born in Poland in 1935, he survived the Holocaust and served as Israel’s ambassador to Poland. “The Polish president was right to refuse to participate,” he added.
However, the Polish government’s current stance is complicated by its own efforts to shape history and promotes its own brand of damaged nationalism.
After the government passed a law that would make it a crime to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, which critics said could stifle free speech, international will was swift. Poland is over rear But not before undermining years of hard work to build better relations with Israel. It also drew strong rebuke from US lawmakers, usually staunch allies.
Pawel Spiewak, director Jewish Historical Institute In Warsaw he said it was very sad. During the war, so many people were “touched by hell”, he said, but A place to find common groundpolitical leaders of the division and the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past.
“The language and value system of the new Europe that emerged after World War II is being forgotten,” he said. “People don’t want to listen to it.” I’d say they’re even tired of it. “
This makes the public more susceptible to false and distorted narratives. This is why Auschwitz itself remains so important.
Unlike many concentration camps where a total of six million Jews were killed over the course of the war, Auschwitz largely escaped destruction.
Last year, more than two million visitors passed under the same trolley iron gate as tens of thousands of prisoners once did, looking at the cruelly ironic words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or work makes you free.
For most during the war, freedom would never come.
While the two main gas chambers were blown up by the Nazis before they fled, the ruins still testify to their existence. Visitors can see the furnaces used to burn the remains of those killed.
The train tracks leading to Birkenau, where the cattle would have arrived, crammed with Jews who were quickly herded into the gas chambers, are no longer in use, but remain a gruesome reminder of the scale, reach and industrialization of the murderous apparatus.
Ronald S. Lauderthe cosmetics billionaire and philanthropist, has made it his mission to help save the site and help raise $110 million for the cause.
He said that while historians can speak to events, there was simply no substitute for hearing the stories of real people in a real place made of real bricks and mortar.
And this anniversary was special, he said, simply because as time goes on, there are fewer witnesses left to tell their story.
“Almost half of the survivors died in the last five years,” he said in an interview. “This will be the last time we bond together.
Zofie Posmysz, a 96-year-old Polish survivor of Auschwitz, will not be able to attend the ceremony, but said she followed a recent political row. She listened to Mr Putin’s attacks on Poland and said: “He takes me back in an instant and keeps me up at night.”
“I’m afraid that over time it will become easier to distort history,” she said in her apartment in Warsaw. “I can’t say it will never happen again, because if you look at some of the leaders today, that dangerous ambition, pride and feeling that they are better than others is still at play.” Who knows where they may lead. “
Joanna Berendt contributed reporting from Warsaw and Andrew Higgins from Moscow.
