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Auschwitz: on Holocaust Memorial Day, world leaders have gathered in Poland on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps.
In Block 27 at Auschwitz, there is the Book of Names. It is a list of around 4.8 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The pages are a metre high and there are 20,000 of them.
On page 12414, my colleague, Simon Stanleigh, finds his great-grandfather.
Schwarz, Berthold, 21/4/1885, Berlin, Germany, Murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
We did not have time to look for his great-grandmother, Martha, also murdered here in 1944. The list of Schwarzes runs for pages and pages and pages. There are nearly five million names. Yad Vashem, which helped compile the list, said it will never be completed given “entire communities were wiped out”.
Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, world leaders have gathered in Poland on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps.
However, they are not the focus. The survivors are the focus. There are not many, given the passage of time. And they are not many because the lesson of the Holocaust is not about survival. It is about murder. Surviving was not normal. Death was the norm.
At Auschwitz, almost a million Jews were murdered. The dead also included Polish prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and members of the Roma and homosexual communities.
World leaders will listen to those who saw evil face to face. And in learning the lesson of “nie wieder,” “never again,” it is important to remember this was not down to the Germans alone, but willing local collaborators across the whole of Europe.
And it is to remember that the Holocaust occurred not solely in concentration camps, but in ghettos, slave labour camps and the mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads.
A spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial said the politicians in attendance would not make speeches. So instead, are they listening and learning from the survivors? And are we too?
It’s worth remembering the long journey to this point.
Talking to survivors these past few days, you realise that the Holocaust was not something instantly discussed after the war. Many who went through that unimaginable ordeal were too traumatised, and too focused on trying to start a life again without their entire families. And they say that others did just not want to hear it. Remember, Anne Frank’s father, Otto, struggled to get her diaries published at first. The Frank house in Amsterdam was almost demolished.
Over the decades that changed, and now Holocaust Memorial Day is an international event.
Today, there are more world leaders here than there are survivors. Will they muse on the rise of populism, the far right, anti-Semitism, and other prejudices, in their own nations as well as elsewhere?
It was back in 2018 that Poland, where today’s events take place, briefly made accusing the Polish nation and its people of complicity in the Nazi atrocities a criminal offence. There are those who, in saying we must learn the lessons of the Holocaust, simply pin the blame on one nation, Germany, when there were many collaborators. Notice the words of the Polish president at Auschwitz today. “The representatives of one people were able to cause such horrible, unimaginable pain and harm to other people and especially the Jewish people. It is something unprecedented in history.”
“One people.” And yet anti-Semitism existed before, during and after the war across Europe, and there is a rise in such prejudice.
As we grapple with the legacy and lessons of the Holocaust, Germany has of course built many memorials and spent decades educating its people about the genocide, making the remembrance of the Holocaust a central part of its post-war identity.
And yet a recent survey revealed that one in nine young Germans was not aware of the Holocaust. In Britain, more than a quarter of people were unable to name a camp or ghetto established by the Nazis.
History, memory, guilt. None of the stories is easy to hear, but some of the lessons are simple.
I am reminded of Auschwitz survivor, Mindu Hornick, 95, who said her message was thus: “To respect each other, respect and not hate. To accept people of any religion, creed or colour and love your neighbour regardless.
“I don’t hate. Hate has catastrophic consequences. Hate is a terrible thing. You lose all sense of reason if you hate.”
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