Loss of Holocaust survivors leaves a void at annual remembrances

Thursday is Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It may be the last time there are Holocaust survivors participating in the March of the Living at AuschwitzBirkenau, the German death camp in Poland. Only eight survivors are expected to attend this week, compared with the 70 survivors who participated in the event in 2019.

The annual Holocaust memorial program is taking place again this year after a two-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Ninety percent of the more than 1 million people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau were Jews. Russian troops liberated the death camp 77 years ago, in 1945.

Many Holocaust survivors have now died, or are too old and frail to travel to Poland for the ceremony that involves a march from Auschwitz to the adjacent camp of Birkenau where the gas chambers and crematories worked non-stop.

The passing of this generation leaves an enormous void at a time when anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are on the rise. The testimony of these Holocaust survivors has played an important role in countering anti-Semitism and Holocaust disinformation.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sees the need for education as more urgent than ever, given the rise of far-right extremism in the United States and globally, including an increase in efforts to deny, to diminish, or to mock the Holocaust.

The ADL Global 100 survey of attitudes toward Jews in more than 100 countries consists of an index of 11 statements such as “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to (whatever country they are living in/ citizens of )” or “Jews have too much power in the business world.”

Familiar anti-Semitic tropes such as “dual loyalty” and “Jewish power and control” are especially widespread in Central and Eastern European countries. For instance, the ADL’s survey, most recently updated in 2019, finds that Poland has a 48 percent anti-Semitic Index Score, with 74 percent of respondents agreeing with the statement that “Jews talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

The degree of ignorance about the Holocaust should be concerning to us all. The Claims Conference, which consists of 23 international Jewish organizations that negotiate claims and distribute compensation to Holocaust survivors, found in a 2020 survey of young Americans that 63 percent did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and were generally ignorant about the Holocaust.

In an interview I did a little more than two years ago, Holocaust survivor Peter Somogyi, now 89, told his story about how he and his twin brother Thomas were taken from Hungary to Auschwitz, separated from their parents, and seized at Auschwitz by Dr. Joseph Mengele, notorious for his experiments with twins.

Somogyi said that, wanting to know what happened to his mother, he asked an older twin who had been assigned to care for him and Thomas. The older boy pointed to the smoke and flames coming from a crematory chimney. That was how he learned how his mother was killed.

For a long time Somogyi was unable to speak about Auschwitz. But in his later years he devoted himself to telling his story and teaching about the Holocaust. His message for future generations: Never Forget.

He, like so many survivors, taught us the importance of remembering. But Somogyi, like most of his generation, is now no longer able to engage in this educational mission.

On this Yom Ha Shoah, with the number of survivors rapidly dwindling, it becomes imperative, all the more so in the face of the killing in Ukraine, that we carry on the mission to “Never Forget.” It is our moral imperative to remember in order to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.