Auschwitz survivors and world leaders set to mark 80 years since Nazi death camp's liberation

NBC News

27-01-2025

OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — The Soviet Red Army troops that arrived here on Jan. 27, 1945, helped uncover one of the greatest atrocities ever committed by — and against — humankind.
Inside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the soldiers liberated roughly 7,000 prisoners who had been brutalized by a Nazi regime hell-bent on exterminating the Jewish people. The horrors there defied comprehension.
Eighty years later, some former prisoners will return here to mark the 80th anniversary of their deliverance — a date that is known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the eyes of so many around the world, the survivors' very existence is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historic cruelty and vast injustice of Adolf Hitler's reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit pleas to the world: Never forget humanity's capacity to commit unthinkable crimes.
Hitler's regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, including roughly 1 million people at Auschwitz. The Nazis also persecuted other peoples, including Poles, the Romani, Soviet prisoners, gay men and mentally and physically disabled people.
The Nazis tried to hide evidence of the genocide they perpetrated, including by burning the remains of roughly 900,000 Auschwitz victims who were killed in the gas chambers.
Eva Umlauf was only 2 when she and her mother were liberated from the camp — too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched onto her skin — A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life, along with some other Auschwitz survivors.
'You are just a number,' Umlauf, 82, a pediatrician from Munich, told NBC News, explaining how this number will forever make her feel. 'But this number is not only on the skin. This is deeper.'
For Umlauf, who traveled for the ceremony along with her sister, son and one of her grandchildren, this was more than a personal journey of memory and reflection. It was a moral responsibility.
'They have to know that it's true. You know, because it's so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,' she said.
But even given what has been established about the Third Reich's crimes against humanity, some of the most vital information has still not been uncovered. Notably, the names of more than a million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis are still unknown, according to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial center.
Alexander Avram leads a team at Yad Vashem that has amassed more than 2 million ' Pages of Testimony' and historical documents in an effort to verify more identities. The project is known as the Hall of Names.
'There are no cemeteries, there are no tombstones … for most of the Holocaust victims,' Avram told NBC News. 'Each additional name that we can recover is, for us, another victory against the Nazis, because the Nazis didn't [only] want to … exterminate the Jews physically. They wanted to obliterate even their memory.'
Avram said researchers have started experimenting with artificial intelligence to scour testimonial documents in the hopes of finding names that might have been previously overlooked. But that technology is useless without firsthand accounts provided by the shrinking pool of survivors.
The Claims Conference estimates that only around 1,000 survivors of Auschwitz are still alive. In that regard, Avram's team is 'in a rush against time,' he said.
The anniversary comes at a troubling and unsettled time. Hamas' terror attack on Israel, Israel's ensuing war in Gaza and the proliferation of hate speech on social media have fueled a worldwide spike in antisemitism.
In some countries, basic knowledge of the Holocaust is eroding.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit organization that helps Holocaust victims seek compensation, released an eight-country survey last week showing that 46% of adults ages 18-29 in France, for example, 'had not heard or weren't sure if they had heard of the Holocaust prior to taking the survey.'
Nearly half of Americans surveyed were unable to name a single Nazi camp, according to the Claims Conference's findings, and more than a quarter (26%) of Americans ages 18-29 disagreed with the following statement: 'The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who were killed during the Holocaust has been accurately and fairly described.'
World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, plan to fly in for Monday's commemoration. Dignitaries, including King Charles III, will be in attendance, too. But none of them will be allowed near a microphone. The organizers of the event have banned speeches by political leaders.
'We really believe that this is the last milestone anniversary where we'll have a visible group of survivors who are still able to tell us their stories,' Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said in an interview with NBC News at the camp Saturday.
'The choice for this year's anniversary was very simple: We need to put them into the spotlight,' he added.
In recent statements, Western heads of state have attempted to underscore the importance of preserving the historical memory of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah.
'I am against turning the page, saying that was long ago,' German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt earlier this month. 'We keep alive the memory of the civilizational split of the Shoah committed by Germans, which we pass down to each generation in our country again and again.'
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for his part, visited the grounds of Auschwitz on Jan. 17, describing the 'sheer horror' he felt there and vowing to fight the rising tide of antisemitism in his country.
Roughly 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps are expected to attend Monday's commemoration. In recent days, hundreds of visitors from around the world have come to the former camp to pay their respects.
Josh Sesar, a 52-year-old from Los Angeles who made his second trip to Auschwitz on Friday, said he believed it is vital to see the grounds firsthand.
'I think it is not taught enough in school in America, and if you watch the news in America now, you see the philosophies that people are following now and they are happy to pretend that this never happened,' Sesar said.
'It is scary, because there are not so many survivors left, and so when there [are] no survivors, people even more so try to discredit history,' he added.
Aron Krell, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and ultimately liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, said it is incumbent on Jewish people, educators, historians and other advocates to keep the legacy of the Shoah intact.
In a video interview last week, Krell described his liberation as his 'second birthday.'
'I saw the light again in front of me,' Krell said. 'My second birthday is more important, really, than the first. We always celebrate it: Aron Krell has two birthdays.'