Auschwitz survivors and world leaders set to mark 80 years since Nazi death camp's liberation
Inside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the soldiers liberated roughly 7,000 prisoners who had been brutalized by a Nazi regime hell-bent on exterminating the Jewish people. The horrors there defied comprehension.
Eighty years later, some former prisoners will return here to mark the 80th anniversary of their deliverance — a date that is known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the eyes of so many around the world, the survivors' very existence is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historic cruelty and vast injustice of Adolf Hitler's reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit pleas to the world: Never forget humanity's capacity to commit unthinkable crimes.
Hitler's regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, including roughly 1 million people at Auschwitz. The Nazis also persecuted other peoples, including Poles, the Romani, Soviet prisoners, gay men and mentally and physically disabled people.
The Nazis tried to hide evidence of the genocide they perpetrated, including by burning the remains of roughly 900,000 Auschwitz victims who were killed in the gas chambers.
Eva Umlauf was only 2 when she and her mother were liberated from the camp — too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched onto her skin — A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life, along with some other Auschwitz survivors.
'You are just a number,' Umlauf, 82, a pediatrician from Munich, told NBC News, explaining how this number will forever make her feel. 'But this number is not only on the skin. This is deeper.'
For Umlauf, who traveled for the ceremony along with her sister, son and one of her grandchildren, this was more than a personal journey of memory and reflection. It was a moral responsibility.
'They have to know that it's true. You know, because it's so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,' she said.
But even given what has been established about the Third Reich's crimes against humanity, some of the most vital information has still not been uncovered. Notably, the names of more than a million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis are still unknown, according to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial center.
Alexander Avram leads a team at Yad Vashem that has amassed more than 2 million ' Pages of Testimony' and historical documents in an effort to verify more identities. The project is known as the Hall of Names.
'There are no cemeteries, there are no tombstones … for most of the Holocaust victims,' Avram told NBC News. 'Each additional name that we can recover is, for us, another victory against the Nazis, because the Nazis didn't [only] want to … exterminate the Jews physically. They wanted to obliterate even their memory.'
Avram said researchers have started experimenting with artificial intelligence to scour testimonial documents in the hopes of finding names that might have been previously overlooked. But that technology is useless without firsthand accounts provided by the shrinking pool of survivors.
The Claims Conference estimates that only around 1,000 survivors of Auschwitz are still alive. In that regard, Avram's team is 'in a rush against time,' he said.
The anniversary comes at a troubling and unsettled time. Hamas' terror attack on Israel, Israel's ensuing war in Gaza and the proliferation of hate speech on social media have fueled a worldwide spike in antisemitism.
In some countries, basic knowledge of the Holocaust is eroding.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit organization that helps Holocaust victims seek compensation, released an eight-country survey last week showing that 46% of adults ages 18-29 in France, for example, 'had not heard or weren't sure if they had heard of the Holocaust prior to taking the survey.'
Nearly half of Americans surveyed were unable to name a single Nazi camp, according to the Claims Conference's findings, and more than a quarter (26%) of Americans ages 18-29 disagreed with the following statement: 'The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who were killed during the Holocaust has been accurately and fairly described.'
World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, plan to fly in for Monday's commemoration. Dignitaries, including King Charles III, will be in attendance, too. But none of them will be allowed near a microphone. The organizers of the event have banned speeches by political leaders.
'We really believe that this is the last milestone anniversary where we'll have a visible group of survivors who are still able to tell us their stories,' Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said in an interview with NBC News at the camp Saturday.
'The choice for this year's anniversary was very simple: We need to put them into the spotlight,' he added.
In recent statements, Western heads of state have attempted to underscore the importance of preserving the historical memory of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah.
'I am against turning the page, saying that was long ago,' German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt earlier this month. 'We keep alive the memory of the civilizational split of the Shoah committed by Germans, which we pass down to each generation in our country again and again.'
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for his part, visited the grounds of Auschwitz on Jan. 17, describing the 'sheer horror' he felt there and vowing to fight the rising tide of antisemitism in his country.
Roughly 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps are expected to attend Monday's commemoration. In recent days, hundreds of visitors from around the world have come to the former camp to pay their respects.
Josh Sesar, a 52-year-old from Los Angeles who made his second trip to Auschwitz on Friday, said he believed it is vital to see the grounds firsthand.
'I think it is not taught enough in school in America, and if you watch the news in America now, you see the philosophies that people are following now and they are happy to pretend that this never happened,' Sesar said.
'It is scary, because there are not so many survivors left, and so when there [are] no survivors, people even more so try to discredit history,' he added.
Aron Krell, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and ultimately liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, said it is incumbent on Jewish people, educators, historians and other advocates to keep the legacy of the Shoah intact.
In a video interview last week, Krell described his liberation as his 'second birthday.'
'I saw the light again in front of me,' Krell said. 'My second birthday is more important, really, than the first. We always celebrate it: Aron Krell has two birthdays.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
How the mystery of Winston Churchill's dead platypus was finally solved
In 1943, a camouflaged ship set off from Australia to England carrying top secret cargo - a single young after his would-be owner, UK prime minister Winston Churchill, the rare monotreme was an unprecedented gift from a country desperately trying to curry favour as World War Two expanded into the Pacific and arrived on its days out from Winston's arrival, as war raged in the seas around him, the puggle was found dead in the water of his specially made "platypusary".Fearing a potential diplomatic incident, Winston's death – along with his very existence – was swept under the was preserved, stuffed and quietly shelved inside his name-sake's office, with rumours that he died of Nazi-submarine-induced shell-shock gently whispered into the mystery of who, or what, really killed him has eluded the world since - until now. Two Winstons and a war The world has always been fascinated by the platypus. An egg-laying mammal with the face and feet of a duck, an otter-shaped body and a beaver-inspired tail, many thought the creature was an elaborate hoax; a taxidermy Churchill, an avid collector of rare and exotic animals, the platypus's intrigue only made him more desperate to have one – or six – for his in 1943 he said as much to the Australian foreign minister, H.V. 'Doc' the eyes of Evatt, the fact that his country had banned the export of the creatures - or that they were notoriously difficult to transport and none had ever survived a journey that long - were merely challenges to had increasingly felt abandoned by the motherland as the Japanese drew closer and closer – and if a posse of platypuses would help Churchill respond more favourably to Canberra's requests for support, then so be David Fleay – who was asked to help with the mission – was less amenable."Imagine any man carrying the responsibilities Churchill did, with humanity on the rack in Europe and Asia, finding time to even think about, let alone want, half-a-dozen duckbilled platypuses," he wrote in his 1980 book Paradoxical Platypus. On Mr Fleay's account, he managed to talk the politicians down from six platypuses to one, and young Winston was captured from a river near Melbourne shortly elaborate platypusary – complete with hay-lined burrows and fresh Australian creek water – was constructed for him; a menu of 50,000 worms – and duck egg custard as a treat – was prepared; and an attendant was hired to wait on his every need throughout the 45-day the Pacific, through Panama Canal and into the Atlantic Ocean Winston went - before tragedy a letter to Evatt, Churchill said he was "grieved" to report that the platypus "kindly" sent to him had died in the final stretch of the journey."Its loss is a great disappointment to me," he mission's failure was kept secret for years, to avoid any public outcry. But eventually, reports about Winston's demise would begin popping up in newspapers. The ship had encountered a German U-boat, they claimed, and the platypus had been shaken to death amid a barrage of blasts. "A small animal equipped with a nerve-packed, super sensitive bill, able to detect even the delicate movements of a mosquito wriggler on stream bottoms in the dark of night, cannot hope to cope with man-made enormities such as violent explosions," Mr Fleay wrote, decades later."It was so obvious that, but for the misfortunes of war, a fine, thriving, healthy little platypus would have created history in being number one of its kind to take up residence in England." Mystery unravelled "It is a tempting story, isn't it?" PhD student Harrison Croft tells the it's one that has long raised so last year, Mr Croft embarked on his own journey: a search for archives in both Canberra and London, the Monash University student found a bunch of records from the ship's crew, including an interview with the platypus attendant charged with keeping Winston alive."They did a sort of post-mortem, and he was very particular. He was very certain that there was no explosion, that it was all very calm and quiet on board," Mr Croft says. A state away, another team in Sydney was looking into Winston's life too. David Fleay's personal collection had been donated to the Australian Museum, and staff all over the building were desperate to know if it held answers."You'd ride in the lifts and some doctor from mammalogy… [would ask] 'what archival evidence is there that Winston died from depth charge detonations?'" the museum's archive manager Robert Dooley tells the BBC."This is something that had intrigued people for a long time."With the help of a team of interns from the University of Sydney, they set about digitising all of Fleay's records in a bid to find out. Even as far back as the 1940s, people knew that platypuses were voracious eaters. Legend of the species' appetite was so great that the UK authorities drafted an announcement offering to pay young boys to catch worms and deliver them to feed Winston upon his the platypus attendant's logbook, the interns found evidence that his rations en route were being decreased as some of the worms began to it was water and air temperatures, which had been noted down at 8am and 6pm every day, that held the key to solving the readings were taken at two of the cooler points of the day, and still, as the ship crossed the equator over about a week, the recorded temperatures climbed well beyond 27C - what we now know is the safe threshold for platypus the benefit of hindsight - and an extra 80 years of scientific research into the species - the University of Sydney team determined Winston was essentially cooked they can't definitively rule out the submarine shell-shock story, they say the impact of those prolonged high temperatures alone would have been enough to kill Winston. "It's way easier to just shift the blame on the Germans, rather than say we weren't feeding it enough, or we weren't regulating its temperature correctly," Ewan Cowan tells the BBC."History is totally dependent on who's telling the story," Paul Zaki adds. Platypus diplomacy goes extinct Not to be dissuaded by its initial attempt at platypus diplomacy, Australia would try again in off the achievement of successfully breeding a platypus in captivity for the first time – a feat that wouldn't be replicated for another 50 years – Mr Fleay convinced the Australian government to let the Bronx Zoo have three of the creatures in a bid to deepen ties with the Winston's secret journey across the Pacific, this voyage garnered huge attention. Betty, Penelope and Cecil docked in Boston to much fanfare, before the trio was reportedly escorted via limousine to New York City, where Australia's ambassador was waiting to feed them the ceremonial first would die soon after she arrived, but Penelope and Cecil quickly became celebrities. Crowds clamoured for a glimpse of the animals. A wedding was planned. The tabloids obsessed over their every move. Platypus are solitary creatures, but New York had been promised lovers. And while Cecil was lovesick, Penelope was apparently sick of love. In the media, she was painted as a "brazen hussy", "one of those saucy females who like to keep a male on a string".Until 1953 that is, when the pair had a four-day fling - rather upsettingly described as "all-night orgies of love" - fuelled by "copious quantities of crayfish and worms".Alas, Penelope soon began nesting, and the world excitedly awaited her platypups, which were to be a massive scientific milestone – only the second bred in captivity, and the first outside four months of princess treatment and double rations for Penelope, zookeepers checked on her nest in front of a throng of excited reporters. But they found no babies - just a disgruntled-looking Penelope, who was summarily accused of faking her pregnancy to secure more worms and less Cecil."It was a whole scandal," Mr Cowan says - one from which Penelope's reputation never later, in 1957, she would vanish from her enclosure, sparking a weeks-long search and rescue mission which culminated in the zoo declaring her "presumed lost and probably dead".A day after the hunt for Penelope was called off, Cecil died of what the media diagnosed as a "broken heart".Laid to rest with the pair was any real future for platypus the Bronx Zoo would try to replicate the exchange with more platypuses in 1958, the finnicky beasts lasted under a year, and Australia soon tightened laws banning their export. The only two which have left the country since have lived at the San Diego Zoo since 2019.
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Memorial to Roma Holocaust victims unveiled in Newcastle
England's first permanent public memorial dedicated to Roma victims of the Holocaust has been memorial has been erected outside Newcastle City Council's headquarters to remember the victims of the genocide and honour soldiers from the region who helped liberate concentration camps in is estimated up to 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered by the Nazis during World War Two and the memorial was funded by the Tyneside Roma Karchnakova, of the Roma Right Path Project, said her great-grandfather Jan was murdered at Auschwitz and the statue "means a lot" to her family. She said she was "very proud" of the local Roma community for creating the Ion, of the Roma Access Association, said the monument was a "powerful statement that history needs to be remembered, commemorated, and that we need to educate younger generations about the atrocities of the past so that those mistakes won't happen again".The former city councillor led the efforts to establish monument and told the Local Democracy Reporting Service he hoped it would help tackle hate crime and racism experienced by his community. "Prejudice against the Roma community is increasing and we need to do a lot of education and outreach so people can understand how hatred and extremism can lead to devastating our communities and people's lives," he said. Dalibar Ferenc, 18, hoped the memorial would spread awareness of the impact of Nazi persecution on Roma people."I never actually learned much about it, especially at school," he Lenga, associate professor at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, praised the city's efforts campaigning for the monument. "I think it will help to challenge anti-Roma discrimination."We need to know these things. We live in such a fragile world where genocide can happen again, is happening again," she said. The memorial was unveiled the day before European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place on the ceremony traditional Roma songs were sung and wreathes laid. Council leader Karen Kilgour said there were about 4,000 Roma people in Newcastle and they had "enriched our city for the better".She said: "This monument is a long overdue tribute to the men, women and children whose lives were stolen by hatred and persecution. "It is also a tribute to those from our own region, soldiers from the North East who bore witness to the horrors of the camps and played a vital role in their liberation. "Their bravery and the lessons history learned must never be forgotten."Local political and religious leaders and members of the Roma community were joined at Friday's event by representatives of the Romanian Embassy and the International Holocaust Remembrance embassy delegate Mariam El-Hek said the memorial was a "long overdue act of justice and act of remembrance". Follow BBC Newcastle on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
Scottish Sun
2 days ago
- Scottish Sun
Breakthrough in hunt for Hitler's gold with dig to begin for legendary £250m ‘Amber Room' treasure stolen by Nazis
The man leading the hunt has spent the last decade searching for the legendary train GOLD RUSH Breakthrough in hunt for Hitler's gold with dig to begin for legendary £250m 'Amber Room' treasure stolen by Nazis Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A BREAKTHROUGH may have been made in the hunt for Hitler's legendary gold train - said to be packed with jewels, gold and the lost £250m Amber Room. Since 1945, governments, the Polish Army and treasure hunters have scoured the terrain searching for the train - and now they believe its location may be in northern Poland. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 4 Legend has it that the train holds up to £20bn worth of Nazi treasure, including the contents of the Amber Room (pictured in 1917) 4 Poland's deputy culture minister said in 2015 that he was 99 percent sure of the existence of the fabled Nazi train 4 Polish authorities have officially granted permission for a new search, according to Wirtualna Polska. Gdańsk's Office for the Protection of Monuments has reportedly approved drilling and archaeological surveys in Dziemiany - located in the Kościerzyna district of northern Poland. The search aim to uncover a suspected WWII-era bunker, which could conceal the fabled train and its valuable artefacts. Marcin Tymiński, spokesperson for the Pomeranian Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments, said there might be a hidden German deposit in Dziemiany. read more world news GOLD TRAIN Nazi gold train hunters uncover letter 'revealing location of Hitler's treasure' 'Some speculate it could even be the lost Amber Room,' he added. The Nazis established a military training ground in Dziemiany for SS units at the end of 1943, according to Jan Delingowski who is leading the treasure hunt. Delingowski, a former merchant fleet radio officer, has spent the last decade searching for the legendary train in the region of Kashubia. In an interview on the YouTube channel History Hiking on Sunday, he pointed to historical evidence linking the suspected treasure site to Nazi official Erich Koch, RMF24 reports, RMF24 reports. Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazis in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945. After WWII, Koch was tried in Poland and convicted in 1959 for war crimes - including responsibility for the deaths of around 400,000 Poles. Mystery of Nazi shipwreck that may hold £100million of Hitler's GOLD & the legendary 'Amber Room' treasure Koch was sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out - officially due to his poor health. However, according to declassified files from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), cited by Rzeczpospolita, the real reason was that the communist-era Polish Security Service and the Soviet KGB hoped he would reveal the location of the Nazi gold train. An inmate who met Koch in the 1980s claimed the Nazi official revealed the treasure's hiding place before his death. Citing the inmate's account, Delingowski says the convoy veered off the road 'somewhere between Czersk and Człuchów, heading toward the Oder'. 4 The hunt for the Nazi gold train has lasted decades Credit: Getty Images - Getty The crates are said to be stashed in a bunker disguised and hidden 'on a hill near a lake, at the site of former SS barracks'. Previous explorations of the region led to the discovery of a brick tank, Wirtualna Polska reports. Based on the testimony and Delingowski's decade-long research, authorities have granted permission to investigate the site. The official decision reads: 'Based on findings from prior heritage surveys, there is reason to believe that a World War II-era slit bunker is located on the plot (...), which may qualify as a historical monument. "Furthermore, historic material - including archaeological artefacts - may be present inside and around it.'
