Getty pictures“Seeing a detention camp with my mother and listening to one of the survivors who passed all of this is what really brought me home. It is important for young people like me. We will soon be able to vote. The extreme right is gaining more and more support in Germany and we need to learn from the past “.
As a 17 -year -old German student. I met him at the Holocaust Education Center in Dakhu, in southern Germany, close to what was once a Nazi detention camp of the same name. He and his colleagues were spending two days there, learning about the Nazi past of their country and discussing its importance in today's world.
The eighteen -year -old Malika admitted that she did not know much about the Holocaust before coming to Dakhu. She said that listening to Eva Omlov, one of the survivors, was talking about what happened, affected her heart.
She expressed her desire to talk about racism and intolerance more frequently. “I wear the hijab and people often refuse this. We need to know more about each other so that we can all live well.”
Miguel warned of increasing racism and anti -Semitism on social media platforms, including jokes about the Holocaust. His 17 -year -old girlfriend, Ida, intervened, saying, “We need to prevent this.”
“We are the last generation who can meet and listen to the people who survived this tragedy. We have to make sure everyone informs to prevent anything like that again again.”
They are serious and optimistic. Some may say naive.
Here in Europe, eighty years after the end of the Holocaust, societies seem to be increasingly divided. There is a rise in support for political parties, often, but not exclusively on the far right and the maximum left, which accelerates to refer to the other. The intruder. Unwanted. Whether they are immigrants, Muslims, a LGBTQ+community, or Jews.
“I want everyone to live together, whether they are Jews, Catholics, black, eggs, or anything else,” says Eva Omlov, the survivor of the Holocaust and who left a great impression on German teenagers.
Holocaust describes a warning to what can happen when bias dominates.
“For this reason, I devote my time to talking, speaking, and speaking,” she says. She is now in her eighties, and she was the youngest prisoner to be released from the Nazi Ginning camp, Auschwitz, eight decades ago on Monday. She wrote a book on her experiences, and besides her work as a psychiatrist, she talks a lot about death camps and anti -Semitism of the public at home and abroad.
“Death Mills” is the title of the American Ministry of War film shown to German civilians after the war, and it was released from footage of the allies captured at the liberation of about 300 detention camp that was run by the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.
Nude people, skeletons, with shaved heads and hollow eyes, run their foot and stumble in front of the camera. A man bites a bone without meat, and it is clear that he is in urgent need of food. Piles of the bodies are scattered in every corner; Mealistic faces are twisted forever in open -mouth screams.
While you are in a warehouse after another, you see carefully written golden teeth, reading glasses and shoes belonging to men, women and children. Package of prisoners hair, packed and ready for sale to achieve Nazi profit.
“My body remembers what my mind forgot”
The Nazis used concentration, death and genocide of people who considered “the enemies of the sheikh” or simply “Untermenschen” (without humans). Among them were among others: ethnic Polish, Roma, Soviet War prisoners, persons with disabilities, and others who were classified as homosexuals and the greatest goal ever: European Jews.
In total, six million Jews were killed in what became known as the Holocaust. The numbers were calculated based on Nazi documents and demographic data before and after the war.
The legal term “genocide” was formulated and recognized as an international crime, following the world's awareness of the extent and intentions of the Nazi mass killing, which continued with enthusiasm even when they were losing the war. It refers to the actions committed with the intention of the overall or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racist or religious group.
Auschwitz may be the most famous Nazi camp. Its horrors have become symbolizing the Holocaust as a whole. There were 1.1 million people, including a million Jews. Most of them were poisoned collectively in the gas rooms. Their bodies were burned in a huge incinerator. The ash given to local farmers for use in their fields.
“I was too small to realize what was happening in Auschwitz,” Eva told students. “But what my mind forgot, my body remembers.”
Adolescents listened with interest. No one was bored or looked at his smartphones, as Eva explained that the number A-26959 is tasked with blue ink on its arm.
The tattoo by force was part of the “operation” for every prisoner who arrived in Auschwitz and was not killed by gas immediately to death, and instead he was chosen for forced work or medical experiments.
“Why did they choose a two -year -old tattoo?” She asks Eva. She says that she found only one answer to this question: that “super people” – where the Nazis believed that they were creating a superior race – they did not believe that the Jews were human.
“We were mice, human beings without humans, and we were completely stripped of our humanity by this main race. Therefore, it wasn't careful if you were two years or 80 years old.”
She tells the shock she inherited from her young mother, the loss of every family member before the Holocaust, and the feeling of the lonely she felt after the war when she was a little girl who had no grandmother embracing her or baking cakes with her, Eva begins at some point in crying silently. . Especially when a video clip of her recently was presented in the annual “Biology March” in Auschwitz, where the survivors walk alongside young people from all over Europe, under the slogan “This will never happen again.”
While watching her, tears pour on the cheeks of a number of teenagers from Eva fans as well.
But a short car away, at the center of the Jewish community in Munich, which was guarded by the Armed Police, Acting Chief of the Jewish community, Charlotte Nubloukh, told me how worried about the escalation of anti -Semitism in the modern era.
Mrs. Nublukh was born in the early thirties of the twentieth century, and remembers how she was holding the hand of her father and watching the windows of Jewish stores as she was destroying and Jewish temples in which fire was burned on the night of crystal, the night of the broken glass in November 1938, when the Nazi regime carried out collective violence against the Jews and their beliefs. Ownership, while most non -Jewish Germans either rejoiced or looked at the other direction.
She says that anti -Semitism did not completely disappear after the war, but she did not think that things would become worrying again as they are now. She says that even in Germany, which has done a lot historically to confront her Nazi past and vigilant against anti -Semitism.
It is an affirmation supported by the accounts transmitted by members of the Jewish community in Germany and other places, who say they are now afraid to wear David's star in public places and prefer not to connect a Jewish newspaper to their homes, for fear that they will be called a “Jew”. Their neighbors.
Studies conducted by the Community Security Fund in the United Kingdom and the European Union's Basic Law Agency tell the same story. FRA says 96% of the Jews who were interviewed in 13 European countries reported that they suffer from anti -Semitism in daily life.
Jewish societies in South America have noticed a significant increase in anti -Semitism as well, while in Canada, incendiary bombs were thrown at a Jewish temple a few weeks ago and a shooting accident occurred in a Jewish school. In the United States, last summer, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated in Cincinnati.
Former President Joe Biden has identified the global high anti -Semitism as a source of concern for foreign policy. The Dibora Lipstadt Academy, whose special envoy to monitor and combat it was highlighting the anti -Semitism on the Internet – often along with Islamophobia and other forms the society. Enhance their goals and their own messages.
She also talks about the global rise in anti -Semitism in the wake of the Israeli military response in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – after the massacre led by Hamas and killed 1,200 people inside Israel on October 7, 2023.
“I think things will be different in 2025.”
Professor Lepstad says that Israeli military actions are often blamed for the Jewish people in general. She says that not all Jews can be responsible for the decisions of the government of Israel. This is racism.
Antonio, which collects information about anti -Semitic incidents in Germany, is listing an incident that occurred last month, as writings were drawn in red letters on the church and municipal building in the town of Langinao, calling for the boycott of Israel and the killing of the Jews with gas. Jews – a reference to Nazi gas rooms in the Holocaust.
Auschwitz and Holocaust did not start with poison gas. Their roots are due to the elimination of centuries -old Jews in Europe.
The CEO of the European Rabbian Conference, Gadi Gronich, warns that targeting minorities is now prevalent again. He says that the Muslim community bears the greatest burden at the present time, also describing itself as being shocked by the levels of anti -Semitism it sees.
It is believed that after 80 years of World War II, some deliberately choose to leave the Holocaust and the responsibility of learning from it in the past.
But the past will not be silent. Near the Polish city of Ghadangsk, and under the ice -covered trees covering the land of the forest, the remains of neglected shoes belong to the Holocaust victims.
There are very small soles, partially buried under the ground, and their murdered owners must have been young children. The stitches on some of the skin pieces are still visible. Millions of shoes here were sent to the leather factory, which was run by slave workers in what was then known as the Stehhofen detention camp.
The shoes came from all over the lands occupied by the Nazis. But it is mainly believed to have come from Auschwitz.
“For me, these shoes scream. They scream: We were alive 80 years ago!” The Polish musician Grezijors Qutukovsky tells me. He has long been a fighter to save and display shoes, along with other shoes already in the Museum of the Camp. Gregor says the shoe message is anti -war and discrimination. It should be heard.
“These shoes were owned by people. As you know, our shoes can be, right? Your shoes, my shoes, my wife's shoes, or my son's shoes. These shoes require attention, not only to keep them, but also to keep them.” Change ourselves (as human beings) in an ethical way I was completely sure that things will be completely different in 2025 from what they are now. “
The commemoration of Auschwitz's liberation this year is seen as of particular importance. Perhaps this is the last great anniversary in which eyewitnesses and survivors will remain alive to tell us what happened – and we ask us: What do we remember today and what are the lessons that we have already forgotten?
