Eighty years ago today, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland, finding 7,000 emaciated inmates who had been left behind after the Germans evacuated this mass killing center in mid-January.
When the battle-hardened Red Army reached the camp, it came upon a landscape of utter devastation. Boris Polevoy, a correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Pravda and one of the first eyewitnesses of this scene of unbelievable suffering, wrote, “I saw thousands of tortured people whom the Red Army had saved, people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess.”
Auschwitz, a searing symbol of the diabolical moral depths to which people can sink, should have had a beneficial and lasting effect on our values, norms and beliefs.
Alas, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this has not been the case. Far too little of the unimaginable horror that this camp evokes appears to have rubbed off on our civilization.
The world we live in, though sublime in its natural beauty, is still nasty and brutish, as the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes once observed.
The war in Ukraine, initiated by Russia in an imperialist land grab, has wiped out a generation of young men on both sides and still rages.
Territorial conflicts and sectarian differences tear asunder the Middle East in a sea of bloodshed.
Starvation swallows hundreds of thousands of Africans on a regular basis.
Climate change, brought on by a callous indifference to our precious eco-systems, threatens to severely damage our planet and our fragile existence on it.
Racism, the bane of a civilized society, continues to be an agent for hatred and violence.
As the United Nations high commissioner for human rights said a few days ago, antisemitism remains “rampant,” eight decades after Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz and Majdanek and U.S. and British forces liberated camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen.
Speaking of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, Volker Turk said of its survivors, “Exhausted, emaciated, terrified and sick, those 7,000 were all that remained of the 1.3 million men, women and children who had been deported to Auschwitz.”
Saying that International Holocaust Remembrance Day should be a reminder of the need to stand up to and resist the plague of intolerance, Turk warned, “Today, hateful rhetoric is reverberating across much of our world.”
And he added, “Antisemitism is rampant, on our streets and on line. Jews face increasing intimidation, threats and physical violence.”
Since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas hordes stormed into southern Israel in a murderous rampage that claimed the lives of about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, antisemitism has been boiling over on a global level.
A sobering report issued by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency on January 22 says there has been a 340 percent spike in antisemitic incidents in the past year. The report, presented to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, warns that the sharp rise in antisemitism poses “a real threat to the foundations of Western democracy and creates cracks in the wall of pluralism and tolerance.”
The statistics are indeed shocking.
Antisemitic incidents in the United States, Canada, France and Britain shot up by 288 percent, 562 percent, 350 percent and 450 percent. In South Africa, Australia and Chile, the figures were 387 percent, 185 percent and 325 percent.
And in another somber sign of the times, social media platforms in China — a country with no tradition of antisemitism — were awash with antisemitic content and conspiracy theories.
Judging by a survey released by the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on January 23, a majority of respondents in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Romania expressed fear that Jews could face another genocidal onslaught on the scale of the Holocaust.
This survey found that an alarming proportion of the population in these countries, particularly people in the 18-29 age range, know very little or nothing about the Holocaust.
Such ignorance, of course, feeds into Holocaust distortion and denial, an insidious form of antisemitism.
As International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked, it is clear that educators have a lot more work to do to disseminate knowledge and build a barrier against racism in all its forms.
