Auschwitz ceremony a somber reminder of the depths of hate and evil
Monday’s ceremony in Auschwitz, commemorating the 75 years since the liberation of the death camp in Poland, was a loaded one — and not only because it was a somber reminder of the abyss that humanity could reach when hate prevails.
The crowd gathered there included heads of state, Holocaust survivors, Jewish community leaders from around the world and journalists. But who, of all people, were missing? Representatives of those who, on Jan. 27, 1945, liberated the camp: soldiers and officers of the
Red Army.
This strange absence has a long history, rooted in the almost half a century of repressive Soviet rule in Poland. The website of the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the key organizers of the event, said this about the Red Army liberation of Auschwitz: “It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of
Nazi totalitarianism.”
Furthermore, in 2015, in the Polish town of Pieniezno, authorities removed the memorial to General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, the Red Army commander who had freed the prisoners of Auschwitz. The Russians were furious about this and, in general, they resented the Polish attitude that marginalized the sacrifice of the Red Army in liberating Poland from the Nazis.
Since December, this Polish-Russian feud took another bitter turn, when Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Poland for having some responsibility for the outbreak of World War II by secretly giving the Nazis the green light to conquer Czechoslovakia, the trigger for the war’s outbreak soon after. The Polish government reacted furiously to these revisionist allegations, citing the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which in 1939 divided Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany and unleashed the war. Last week, Polish President Andrzej Duda boycotted a previous 75th anniversary Auschwitz commemoration, held at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem, complaining that he hadn’t been invited to speak while Putin was.
On Monday, Duda had the podium and the world’s attention to himself, and he refrained, wisely, from adding more fuel to the fire. However, he spoke about Polish suffering and sacrifices during World War II and about the fact that the Poles fought against the Nazis “from the first to the last day of the war.”
Naftali Furst, from the northern Israeli city of Haifa, also attended the ceremony. He was 12 when he was shipped to the death camp in a cattle wagon. What he went through broke adults much stronger than he was. He explained his secret in his memoir. “Dad said to my brother Shmuel and me: ‘You must survive. You must!’’ ” Instead of letting the morbid memories haunt and weaken him, the energetic 88-year-old is proud of the new life he began in Israel.
Indeed, when Ronald Lauder, former U.S. ambassador to Austria, took to the podium, he reminded the crowd what this ceremony was about, the survivors. “After everything that happened to them, these Jewish survivors just walked out of these gates and went on to build new lives, raise new families, work hard and create. Some have grandchildren here today,” he said.
Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, has been passionate about preserving this concentration camp, one of the few physical memorials to Nazi atrocities. He sounded the alarm against the rise of anti-Semitism and called upon the world leaders assembled to act. “It is shameful that 75 years later, [the survivors] now see their grandchildren face this same hatred again. This is a shame, and it must never be tolerated.”
As Lauder saluted the 120 survivors of Auschwitz he had invited to the ceremony, I thought about
Furst and about David Lenga, of Woodland Hills, California, who had stood there in Auschwitz on Sunday telling us that out of his extended family of 200 people, only he and his father survived. “I didn’t let the Holocaust define my life,” he told us emphatically in Auschwitz, moving us to tears. Who will tell the story when these brave people are all gone?
It seems that Lauder has an answer. On other occasion he said: “Universal, honest Holocaust education is critical in ensuring that not only do we never forget, but that our children and grandchildren fully comprehend the depth of the greatest crime in history, so nothing like it ever happens again.”