World Remembers Liberation Auschwitz Amid Concerns About Antisemitism (Worthy News In-Depth)
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
OSWIECIM, POLAND (Worthy News) – World leaders and dozens of Holocaust survivors gathered Monday at the former site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.
The ceremony was overshadowed by concerns about rising antisemitism and fears that the world’s worst tragedy in recent history may soon be forgotten.
It was also regarded as likely one of the last major observances of Auschwitz’s liberation that survivors would be able to attend due to their advanced ages.
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jews, known as the Holocaust, or Shoah.
One million Jews died in the Nazi-run death camp built in Oswiciem in southern Poland between 1940 and 1945.
Most of them were killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers as well as through torture and starvation. Germany’s Nazi regime also killed some 100,000 non-Jews, including Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people, and disabled people.
Yet, eight decades after Soviet troops found survivors in the throes of starvation and the many human remains of those who passed away, concerns were raised that the tragedy may occur again.
‘WORLD BECOMING TOXIC’
“The world has become toxic,” noted 86-year-old Tova Friedman. She was 6 years old when she was among the 7,000 people liberated from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
“I realize that we’re in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction,” added Friedman who flew to Poland this month from her home in the U.S. state of New Jersey.
For Friedman, one of the youngest Auschwitz survivors, “January 27 [when the camp was liberated] has always been my true birthday. I’ve celebrated it every year since I was a little girl. It’s the day that counts.”
Friedman expressed disbelief at commemorating the milestone alongside “so many important people,” including Britain’s King Charles and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof and State Secretary Vincent Karremans also attended the ceremony, along with Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Dutch Queen Maxima. It also marked the first time the 21-year-old Crown Princess Amalia participated in such an event.
The Netherlands sent a large government delegation just months after the nation experienced what some described as the first pogrom against Jews there since the Holocaust.
On November 6 and 7 November, Dutch people of mainly Moroccan and Turkish Muslim descent launched what organizers called a “Jew hunt” in Amsterdam around the soccer match between Amsterdam’s Ajax and Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv.
DOZENS WERE INJURED
Dozens were injured in the violence that some said was partly provoked by Israeli soccer fans shouting anti-Arab slogans related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
However, several Dutch and Israeli politicians said the specific hunting of Jews, including asking for their passports before attacking them, amounted to a pogrom resembling the Nazi era.
At the ceremony in Auschwitz, Friedman said that the “resurgence of anti-Semitism is shocking. “Our Judeo-Christian values are overshadowed by prejudice, fear, and extremism. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its right to exist.”
It was also a reference to October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel in the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, sparking the Israel-Hamas war.
Dignitaries from 54 nations joined her and more than 60 other survivors and their families inside a large tent erected over Auschwitz’s infamous entrance, known as “the gate of death.”
The central image of the commemoration was a train track leading to a symbolic wagon. However, the speeches primarily addressed today’s challenges rather than focusing solely on the liberation eight decades ago.
“Five and ten years ago, I spoke here about the Holocaust in the past tense,” said Ronald Lauder, a major donor to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. “I never thought I would see the boycotts, targeted attacks, and exclusions happening again.”
DRAWING HOLOCAUST PARALLELS
He drew parallels between the atrocities of the Holocaust and the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, both rooted, he said, in “centuries-old Jew-hatred.”
As Holocaust survivors issued calls for vigilance and action, several warned that the world was sliding into another crisis.
“We are not only mourning the victims but also the unrest and distrust tearing apart our societies,” Friedman noted. “We must reignite our collective conscience to combat the violence and hatred spreading today. It’s an immense challenge, but we are obligated to try.”
The ceremony concluded with an emotional tribute.
For Monday’s commemoration in Oswiecim, the U.S. sent a delegation led by Steve Witkoff, President Donald J. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who played a key role in negotiating this month’s Gaza truce agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce, was also present, as was Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s choice as ambassador to France.
Dozens of other leaders and dignitaries attended Monday’s ceremony, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Britain’s King Charles III, and French President Emmanuel Macron, but organizers asked them not to speak.
LISTENING TO OBSERVE
Instead, they were requested to listen and observe as they toured the Auschwitz grounds, which now operates as a memorial site whose goal is to inform visitors about the atrocities that happened at the site.
Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima lit candles in memory of the victims, while Crown Princess Amalia, dressed in black, paid her respects with a solemn nod.
They made clear that the event underscored the urgent need to remember the lessons of history amid rising global tensions.
Before the ceremony, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda remembered the victims of Auschwitz in a television address, saying his nation has a unique role in preserving its memory. “We Poles, on whose land occupied by Nazi Germany the Germans built this extermination industry and concentration camp,” said Duda, “are today the guardians of memory.”
At the ceremony on the former grounds of Auschwitz, Duda, accompanied by survivors, laid a wreath at the so-called “Death Wall,” where shooting executions took place. Some survivors wore blue-and-white striped scarves, the colors of the prisoner uniforms they were forced to wear at the camp.
In several interviews with German media, Chancellor Olaf Scholz commented that it was “depressing how many people in Germany hardly know anything about the Holocaust.” Each state in Germany has control over how the Holocaust is taught in schools, and instruction is inconsistent, he suggested.
His comments came days after U.S. billionaire Elon Musk joined via video link a political rally organized by the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, telling thousands of party supporters that Germany places too much emphasis on “past guilt.”
SINS OF PARENTS
“Children should not be held responsible for the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said to cheers. However, he also made clear in separate comments that he loves the Jewish people wearing a tag with the names of hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
A day after the political rally, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote in a post on social media X that calls at the political rally “about ‘Great Germany’ and ‘the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”
In an appearance on Germany’s public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Abraham Lehrer, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of the horrors Nazi Germany perpetuated at Auschwitz: “We must not allow commemoration to be ‘enough.’ ”
That’s why a U.S.-based organization is transforming the house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss into a research center devoted to fighting extremism.
The Counter Extremism Project was introduced to the public on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday.
The house, which belonged to a Polish military family before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, lies next to the site of the former death camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
“My dream, and those of our colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic that comes here takes action to fight extremism and antisemitism wherever they come from,” said Mark Wallace, the CEO of the Counter Extremism Project.
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