Eighty years of Auschwitz’s liberation with less and less survivors and more denialist of the Holocaust

Read also: “My grandfather was the greatest mass murderer in history”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in charge of organizing the commemorative ceremony, expects the assistance of some 50 survivors from different Nazi fields, in addition to the visit of political leaders and members of the royalty of 40 countries, such as Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, among others.

The release of this extermination field, in addition, served to establish the international day in memory of the victims of the Holocaustso there will be commemorative activities in different cities in the world. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, for example, will be present at the commemorative ceremony that will take place at the UN Headquarters in New York.

The situation of the Hebrew state prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is much more complex because a capture order issued by the International Criminal Court in the framework of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Although the Polish government has promised not to execute the arrest order if Netanyahu attends the event, it is still unknown if the prime minister will go.

In any case, the Auschwitz Museum has tried to highlight that this is not a political event and has put the lens on a topic that could be much more relevant: the survivors.

In 2015, some 300 survivors participated in the commemoration of the 70 years of liberation, while for this occasion it is expected to have the presence of just 50.

– Hell on earth –

Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939 and a year later they opened the Auschwitz concentration camp in the city of Oswiecim. What was initially planned as a detention center for Polish prisoners in a short time became the closest thing to hell on earth.

“The field demonstrated how modern institutions could be instrumentalized for barbarism at an industrial scale. The liberation of the countryside exposed the horrors of Nazi genocide to the world and raised questions about the nature of modern civilization that persist until today. What began as a political prison for Poles became an industrial complex of dozens of fields and subcampos, and within it Birkenau or Auschwitz II, the main death factory of the Jewish genocide”, Explains a Commerce Yoel Schvartz, historian, teacher and guest speaker at the school of teaching of the Holocaust of Yad Vashem (Israeli Official Institution constituted in memory of the victims of the Holocaust).

In total, about 40 fields settled in the area, including Birkenau where mass murders were committed within the infamous gas cameras. Even Auschwitz arrived daily trains loaded with men, women, children and the elderly. Some were gypsies, other political, homosexual, prisoners of war and members of different minorities.

But if a group stood out, they were the Jews. During the five years in which Auschwitz operated, around 1.3 million prisoners arrived, of which less than 15%survived.

“Of the more than 1.1 million victims killed in Auschwitz, approximately one million were Jews, turning this place into the world’s greatest Jewish cemetery. This dimension of extermination makes Auschwitz the central symbol of the Holocaust”, Schvartz comments.

– Auschwitz survived twice –

“It was never easy to tell this story, nor is it today”, Confessed Hirsz Litmanowicz that afternoon of July 2019 in which Commerce He visited it for the first time. The man who had survived Nazi experiments, the march of death and seclusion in the fields of Sachsenhause and Auschwitz being just a child, did not imagine that in a few months he would have to face the darkest ghosts of his past again.

In January 2020, Hirsz was one of the survivors invited to commemoration for the 75 years of Auschwitz’s liberation. “I am one of those who the Nazis did not kill”The then 89 -year -old man told International Television.

The emotional burden of his visit, however, deeply affected his heart health. Hirsz had to be admitted to a medical center close to the concentration camp and would later be transferred to Israel to fully recover.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions imposed due to such health emergency delayed its return to Peru, but soon after its return, it went to the events organized by the educational center again Holocaust and humanities. “If this is not counted, it is forgotten or worse, they will believe that it never happened”He once explained.

Schvartz, who has directed educational projects in Israel and Latin America, in addition to coordinating study groups on Jewish history and the Holocaust In Europe, it coincides with the importance of documenting these testimonies for “Keep the memory of the holocaust alive when there are no survivors”

Words that take a special dimension when reviewing the study published by the Anti -Fame League (ADL) this month, where it is revealed that 21% of respondents believe that the Holocaust It is exaggerated or never happened, while 20% have never heard of it. These figures, product of a study applied in 58,000 adults from 103 countries, represent more than double the level of global anti -Semitism recorded in 2014.

“Education faces the challenge of the banalization and manipulation of discourse on Nazism and holocaust. The historical and moral consensus weakens when these events are instrumentalized for contemporary political debates without historical rigor. The recent tendency to characterize as “Nazi” any adverse political position, or revisionist attempts such as classifying Nazism as a leftist movement, not only distort history but also hinder education would be about the Holocaust. Museums, historical sites and educational programs must combat both denial and these distortions with documented evidence and historical rigor”Says Schvartz.

The expert highlights, on the other hand, projects such as those carried out by the Shoah and Zikaron Basalon Foundation (“Hall memory”) where survivors share their stories or the work of institutions such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC that maintain extensive files and develop global educational programs.

In September 2019, Commerce The documentary “survived the Holocaust” premiered in which the history of four survivors was documented who after crossing that atrocious experience were established in Peru. In these five years, Lothar Rosenmann and Norbert Feiger, two of them, died, but the registration of their stories guarantees that their legacy will last over time.

– Latin American distance –

“In Latin America, Holocaust’s teaching faces multiple distances: geographical, temporal and conceptual. The temporal distance makes it difficult to understand the extreme vulnerability of the Jews in the Europe of interwar and during the Nazism”, Recognizes Schvartz.

However, “he Holocaust It was no stranger to the region, which welcomed Jewish survivors and refugees, while several countries were also a place of refuge from Nazis criminals”, He adds.

The expert considers that education on this dark era of humanity is strengthened when connected to local authoritarianism experiences and human rights violations, but also when it is enriched with details about the context that led to that catastrophe. “COMO A minority integrated in Europe for centuries was transformed into a ‘racial enemy’ that should be exterminated. This dimension of the Holocaust – the transformation of neighbors into ‘others’ – has special relevance to reflect on racism and discrimination in Latin America”, He remarks.

However, the same study of the ADL mentioned paragraphs behind evidences that less than half of the respondents in Latin America recognized what the Holocaust77% of Brazilian participants even indicated that “The Jews talked too much about Holocaust“And 63% of Peruvians considered that”Jews do not care what happens to anyone but those of their own community”

The truth is that these results are very similar in the rest of the world, especially after the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, which has brought huge peaks of both anti -Semitism and Islamophobia.

Within the framework of this conflict, Israel has been accused before the International Court of Justice for South Africa to perpetrate a genocide in the Gaza Strip. After months, the ICJ determined in May 2024 that at the moment they did not need to rule on whether a genocide had occurred but subsequently attended to a South African order ordering Israel to take measures to “protect against additional, serious and irreparable damage to the rights of the Palestinian people”

“The 1948 Convention established precise technical criteria for the legal definition of a genocide. I have recently written about how we are witnessing a process in which the term “genocide” is becoming an empty signifier, selectively applicable according to political agendas. This was evidenced in January 2024 when Uganda Judge Julia Sebutinde issued the only dissident vote in the International Court of Justice, arguing that the technical criteria were not fulfilled to establish a plausible risk of genocide. His “minority report”, such as the Spielberg movie, was systematically suppressed to maintain an illusion of consensus”, Says Schvartz.

“This emptying of the term not only distorts the debate on the current conflict but also weakens the international mechanisms designed to prevent and punish genuine genocidal processes. The precision in terms does not compete with the recognition of suffering: Explaining the specific differences between different types of violence allows us to properly understand each act in its terrible singularity”, Concludes the expert.