It is they who deserve to be heard on such a day, those few who survived the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp, of whom 56 traveled back to the site of horror to attend the memorial ceremony.
The Soviet Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, in what is today Poland, occupied at the time by Nazi Germany. Only just over 7,000 people survived, emaciated by imprisonment and torture. The date now serves as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
An industrial murder factory
Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazis murdered over a million people in Auschwitz and the camp’s horrific subcamps, the majority of them Jews. But Sinti and Roma, political prisoners, homosexuals, the disabled, and imprisoned people from Poland and other nations were also victims of the murderous regime.
Auschwitz has become synonymous with the Holocaust, its “capital,” as historian Peter Hayes put it. It was an industrial murder factory, the full dimensions of which weren’t fully grasped until decades later — if such a thing can ever truly be grasped.
On Monday, 80 years to the day after the liberation of the camp, survivors, heads of state and government, and guests of honor gathered at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp for a major memorial ceremony celebrating the anniversary. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz attended on behalf of Germany.
Unlike previous anniversaries, there were no speeches by politicians — despite the delegations from 60 nations that traveled to the event. It was political all the same. Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was a recurring theme, with the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, saying that Jewish students in many countries have been marginalized and that Israel has been singled out for scorn.
But it was the survivors in particular who spoke: Marian Turski, Janina Iwa?ska, Tova Friedman, and Leon Weintraub. “I always thought that January 27 was my birthday. Even many of my friends don’t know that it’s not actually my birthday,” said Friedman at the beginning of her speech.
Survivor testifies of Mengele’s regime of torture
Turski welcomed the survivors in the audience and commemorated all those who could not be there: “I believe our thoughts go towards the huge majority, those millions of victims who will never tell us what they experienced, what they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction, the Shoah (Holocaust).”
On this evening, the survivors spoke about their personal experiences and made the connection to today. Turski said the world is currently experiencing a “tsunami of antisemitism.” She demanded that “an end be put to this!” and asked for a moment of silence.
Many survivors have passed away. But it is their experiences that keep memory alive. In the days leading up to the memorial ceremony on the camp grounds, commemorative events were held in the nearby town of Oswiecim and Krakow. The Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow hosted a conversation with Lidia Maksymowicz.
She was sent to Auschwitz at the age of three. And became a victim of the notorious SS camp doctor Josef Mengele. He tortured her with saline solutions as part of medical experiments. After the war, Maksymowicz was separated from her mother and adopted. She had to relearn everything, she said. She felt like “a wild animal with only survival instincts.”.
Trauma ‘I will carry with me forever’
Stefania Wernik is one of the last surviving eyewitnesses, although she has no memory of Auschwitz. She was only a few months old when it was liberated. As Wernik puts it, she was born into “hell.” In April 1944, her Polish mother was caught smuggling and sent to Auschwitz. She was two months pregnant and kept it a secret. When it was discovered, she was allowed to have her child — under extremely difficult circumstances. Stefania Wernik weighed only 2 kilograms (4.5 pounds) at birth.
The day before the memorial ceremony, Wernik spoke with at the International Meeting Center in Oswiecim near the extermination camp. “That which I have absorbed with my mother’s milk into my soul, I will carry with me forever,” said Wernik through a Polish interpreter. “It’s not easy for me to just simply laugh.”
Even today, she is often ill and fatigued. As a small baby, the infamous SS camp doctor Josef Mengele presumably injected her with something. To this day, she often has eczema and rashes. Wernik hesitates during this story and has to collect herself for a moment.
About 80 young adults between the ages of 17 and 25 and hailing from Germany, France and Poland filled the hall of the Meeting Center, listening to Wernik’s words. They wore masks due to Wernik’s poor health.
The German Bundestag’s Youth Exchange had organized the event. For some of the young visitors who visited Auschwitz-Birkenau the day before, it was their first time seeing an extermination camp in person.
The young audience asked many questions about her trauma and about what had given her hope. Wernik replied patiently, not ignoring a single question. Her answers were both gentle and sad. For 21-year-old Peter Cellestino Kraus, it was an encounter that will resonate with him for a long time.
“What they tried to do in the Holocaust was to dehumanize people, to turn them into numbers,” he said. “And we have to humanize them again, give people a face, in order to understand that there were millions of people who dreamed of a tomorrow and never experienced it.”
Those survivors who spoke at the memorial ceremony also kept returning to these people. “We were born into a moral vacuum,” said Tova Friedman. Millions did not survive. “But today, we have an obligation not only to remember but also to warn and to teach that hatred only begets more hatred, killing more killing.”
In the same vein, Stefania Wernik told the students the day before: “Never again war, never again fascism. You must remain vigilant… so that nothing like this ever happens again. That’s what I wrote. [I was] born in hell, in Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
This article was originally written in German.