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Time Magazine
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
What the Holocaust Teaches Us
Amid the year's turmoil, the world is recognizing 80 years since the end of the Holocaust. Commemorations began on Jan. 27, when many world leaders joined survivors in Oświęcim, Poland, to mark the liberation of Auschwitz. This month, we observe the liberations of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, as well as Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) on April 24. Ceremonies will occur in North America's 175-plus Holocaust centers and museums, and at thousands more memorials, schools, and communities around the world. The fact that we remember is important, but what does the Holocaust teach us? It's hard to answer this question given how frequently references to the Holocaust appear in our discourse while at the same time detailed knowledge of the subject has seemingly declined. Yet there are some big lessons worthy of review. First, crimes like the Holocaust require a series of conditions. They often happen in failed states. The inability of Germany's Weimar Republic to secure liberal democratic values and civil discourse provided fertile ground for Nazism's rise. The Nazi Party came to power through a democratic process despite (or perhaps because of) a platform that degraded individual dignity, pushed harmful stereotypes, promoted false nostalgia for 'better days,' and used communications technologies to propagandize and recruit. Once in government, it turned toward authoritarianism, undermining national institutions, the media, the civil service, the intellectual classes, and the law so the state would mirror its ideology and its goals. To be sure, many other countries since 1945 have had ruling parties that share similar characteristics, but which did not bring about a genocide. Therefore, getting to the Holocaust required additional steps, including the apathy of the masses, the complicity of the elite, and the failure of the international community. Holocaust survivor Marian Turski warned us all to be vigilant against indifference for good reason: turning inward at times of strife prevents us from being brave and leads to the exploitation of the vulnerable. In perpetrator countries, most people were passive witnesses, but there was also considerable participation by elites including artists, university professors, Catholic and Protestant clergy, media moguls, business leaders, and even physicians. Just as the elites proved weak, so too did the international order, as shown by the number of countries eager to appease or function as if all is normal. Just consider how the U.K. and France gave Hitler much of Czechoslovakia in 1938, or when the U.S. and dozens of others decided at the Evian Conference to refuse to allow more Jewish refugees into their countries, or when the Soviets agreed with the Nazis to occupy and divide Poland in 1939. These failures only emboldened fascism and its crimes. Finally, and critically, the Holocaust needed antisemitism, a common hatred older than Western civilization that cut across all segments of society. Thousands of years of hatred of the Jews had already led to the murders of hundreds of thousands, but under authoritarian rule it provided the framework needed for the Nazis to find willing participants and collaborators, and for large swathes of the population to variously ignore or join in violence against Jews. We all have the possibility to become perpetrators or passive witnesses to such crimes, but we can only know this if we also understand that the Holocaust happened to real people with hopes and dreams, flaws and challenges, and an intrinsic humanity. This lesson is essential, and it is why Holocaust survivors shared their personal histories with the world. By opening our eyes to the crimes of the past, they create a lens for the future; one that binds us, Jews and non-Jews alike, to this subject and to one another. If we ever hope to truly learn from the Holocaust, we must engage with the history as it happened to those who lived it. This brings us to a final key lesson, one that deserves emphasis: no one who comes to understand this history can abide the conditions that led to the Holocaust, including hatred of Jews. This subject changes us, forcing an awareness of the signs and forms of hate and other risks to peace. To make use of this knowledge, we must reject cynicism and apathy. If we do not, to echo the Holocaust survivor and intellectual Emil Fackenheim, we risk giving the Nazis posthumous victories. To prevent this, we must understand this history, know how it is relevant to our future, and remember the victims and survivors of the Holocaust in ways that will lead to the world they deserved and not the one they experienced.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz, review: a film so powerful it's tempting to turn away from it
There is a temptation when confronted with a film like Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz (BBC Two) to turn away. His story of how the Holocaust was a European-wide crime of complicity is overwhelming, horrific, atrocity layered upon atrocity until it's just easier to change the channel. The film's primary message, however, is that apathy is deadly. As 98-year-old survivor Marian Turski says to Schama at the film's close, 'Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Evil comes step by step. And therefore, you shouldn't be indifferent.' Turski, a heart-rending caption informs us at the end, died three months after that interview, but that was also a reminder of Schama's second tenet: as we reach a moment where the last survivors are dying it is up to historians – and documentary-makers, and in this case viewers – to make sure that it is never forgotten. Time and again throughout Schama's journey, showing how evil came step by step through Lithuania, the Netherlands, Warsaw and eventually to the pitiless conclusion of Auschwitz-Birkenau, he stressed the importance of testimony. Some of the bravest acts were diary entries, secret photographs, records made in grave danger and then buried so that future generations could know what happened. The irony, of course, is that hatred and Holocaust denial all over the world is on the rise. We are indeed ignoring the lessons of history, even when the lessons are as vital and as clearly explicated as they were in this film. But it was not an easy pill to swallow because a third lesson was embodied in the photos of local people looking on, sometimes pointing or just walking by as Jews were dehumanised, mistreated, massacred and finally liquidated. Complicity was collaboration: 'What happened was only made possible by centuries of dehumanisation of Jews,' said Schama. 'The Germans were only doing what millions of other people wanted to happen.' Coming shortly after the government urged the public to view Netflix's Adolescence for instruction on how to understand the next generation, they would do well to add this to their watch list so that we can wrestle with humanity more broadly. Because, as Schama stressed, even as a historian, there's only so much one can understand. To really grasp what happened at Auschwitz, and the steps right across Europe that led to it happening, you need to talk to someone who lived it. There aren't many left. It makes films like this one all the more vital, where the act of showing it and watching it is part of the message: we must not turn away. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Marian Turski, Who Refused to Forget the Holocaust, Dies at 98
Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World War II to give voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches about the dangers of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his home in Warsaw. He was 98. His death was announced by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which he had helped to establish and whose board he had chaired since 2009. Speaking in 2020 at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where he was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a teenager, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he called 'a huge rise in antisemitism.' 'Auschwitz did not fall from the sky,' he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. 'It began with small forms of persecution of Jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. That is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended.' 'The 11th Commandment is important: Don't be indifferent,' he asserted. 'Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.' He added: 'If you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.' His father and younger brother were killed at Auschwitz, and he lost 37 other relatives in the Holocaust. Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University, a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of 'Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz' (2025), said Mr. Turski had exemplified 'those members of the survivor generation who, instead of turning inward and wallowing as they might easily have done in their suffering, devoted himself to the future, to making sure that nothing like the horrors he and European Jewry experienced in the Holocaust would happen again to anyone else.' Only weeks before his death, Mr. Turski returned to the camp where he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet army. 'We have always been a tiny minority,' he said, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. 'And now only a handful remain.' For decades, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer among them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka magazine, which he went to work for in 1958; as chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and as the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled 'Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Living' (1996-2001). 'Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,' Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement this week. He described Mr. Turski as 'a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict and understanding over hostility.' Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a city that was part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania. His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal trader who came from a family of rabbis, had planned to emigrate to Palestine but remained in Europe because of a recurring lung ailment, a result of a wound sustained while serving in the Russian army during World War I. Mr. Turski's mother, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk. Mosze attended Jewish primary and secondary schools in Lodz, but once the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews were confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped support his family by tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and working in a smokehouse, where he butchered horse meat. He also joined the Communist resistance. Two weeks after his parents and younger brother were deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of the last transports from Lodz. He figured his chances of surviving were better at Auschwitz-Birkenau than in the ghetto, which the Nazis were obliterating. His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany; she survived the war and died in 1988. Mosze's experience, too, was one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; forced to join a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance; and sent to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 pounds before the camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. After the war, he returned to Poland as a committed Socialist. Given the antisemitism in the country, a Communist official suggested that he adopt a non-Jewish name; he chose Marian Turski. He earned a degree in history from the University of Wroclaw. Joining the Polish Workers' Party, Mr. Turski became a committed Communist official, enforcing censorship, imposing crop quotas on farmers and presiding over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German occupation — all, he would later say, in the interests of promoting Polish nationalism and socialism. In 1965, while studying and lecturing in the United States on an eight-month State Department scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a ceremony in Warsaw, asked Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, 'Simply out of solidarity with all those who fought for their civil rights and against racial divisions.' In the late 1960s, he soured on Soviet communism because of the government's official policy of antisemitism and Moscow's opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That 'accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously,' he said. While he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz in the 1970s, a trip he would make more than once. In 2020, he urged Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, to ban Holocaust deniers from that social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg eventually did so that year. Mr. Turski's wife, Halina (Paszkowska) Turski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, served as a messenger for the resistance and later worked as a sound engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He is survived by their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. 'Soft-spoken, an intellectual giant, he remained in Poland so that his voice resonated as closely as possibly to the abyss,' Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, said. 'He could tell people, 'I have seen this,'' he added. 'It is now going to be our task — the following generations — to make sure the authentic memory of the survivors becomes ingrained in our consciousness. We cannot replicate the voice of the survivors, but we can make sure that the questions they asked, the warnings they raised, remain ingrained in our consciousness.'
BBC News
19-02-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Marian Turski, Holocaust survivor and historian, dies aged 98
Polish Holocaust survivor, historian and journalist Marian Turski has died aged in 1926, Mr Turski survived the Lodz Ghetto, extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and two death marches as a dedicating himself to history and journalism in post-war Poland, he co-founded Warsaw's landmark Jewish history museum and became president of the International Auschwitz drew international attention on the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation in 2020, when he remarked Auschwitz "did not fall from the sky" and warned it could happen again. Mr Turski was born as Moshe Turbowicz and spent much of his childhood in the Polish city of Lodz. After the Nazis conquered Poland in 1940, he and his family were moved to the Jewish ghetto established in the city which was plagued by disease, starvation and forced 1944, his parents and younger brother were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau – where Mr Turski, still a teenager, was to arrive two weeks later in one of the last transports from the Lodz Turski's father and brother were killed in the gas chambers, while his mother was sent to work at the Bergen Belsen camp in northern January 1945, as Soviet troops advanced, Mr Turski was among the 60,000 prisoners the Nazis forced to walk west in what came to be known as death marches. He first marched to concentration camp Buchenwald and later on to Terezin, where he was liberated on the brink of death from exhaustion and said it was as if he had amnesia after leaving Auschwitz, where he did not return for 20 years."I could never forget that I was in Auschwitz, because I have a number tattooed on my arm and I see it every day," he told Polish outlet Onet."However, after the war, I was struck by amnesia... I remembered individual episodes perfectly: arriving at the camp, a few other things, some stories from the death marches. Everything else was blurred, though."He rejected an offer to migrate west after the war, instead returning home in the hopes of building a socialist Turski studied history at the University of Wrocław, during which time he took up journalism and worked in political 1958, he became editor of the magazine Polityka's history section, from which he went on to become an influential journalist and historian. 'Do not be indifferent' Mr Turski drew international attention at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2020, remarking that Auschwitz "did not fall from the sky".It approached "with small steps until what happened here, happened," he said the Eleventh Commandment of the Bible should be "thou shalt not be indifferent"."Because if you are indifferent, before you know it, another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants," he was one of four survivors who spoke again at the 80th anniversary in warned world leaders gathered by the gates of the camp that "we can observe a significant rise of antisemitism in today's world, and yet it was precisely antisemitism that led to the Holocaust".Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the Jewish community would miss Mr Turski greatly."Marian was our teacher, he was our moral voice and mentor. "He was steeped in Jewish wisdom and used it to guide us on how to face today's problems. We are so blessed that we had Marian with us for so many years."Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Mr Turski's words had become "a motto for us".He wrote on X: "The 11th Commandment for these difficult times."Polityka magazine called Mr Turski "an extraordinary man, a witness to the ages, our friend" whose voice was heard "all over the world".
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Marian Turski, head of International Auschwitz Committee, dead at 98
The 98-year-old president of the International Auschwitz Committee, Marian Turski, is dead. The Holocaust survivor died on Tuesday in Warsaw, the committee - an association of Auschwitz survivors and their organizations from 19 countries - announced in a statement. Turski was elected president of the organization in 2021. "Auschwitz survivors in many countries are saying goodbye with great pain and infinite gratitude to their friend, brother and fellow sufferer Marian Turski, who was heard all over the world as a powerful representative of their memories and as the voice of their murdered relatives," said the committee's executive vice president, Christoph Heubner. Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, wrote on X: "We will ensure that the story of Holocaust survivor Marian Turski lives on." She added: "Today the world lost a man who lived through the horror and the evil of concentration camps." German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, writing on X, remarked that Turski labelled "you should not be indifferent" as the "11th commandment." "Not to be indifferent is a task for the state - and a civic duty that we carry forward. It is our obligation," Scholz said. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, also on X, wrote that Turski's "legacy is now our mission to all of us to carry forward his message of remembrance of the Shoah and reconciliation in Europe." Until the last days of his life, Turski followed political developments with increasing concern as a journalist and eyewitness. Heubner said Turski was dismayed by the Europe-wide resurgence of anti-Semitic and far-right extremist ideologies. Heubner said Turski's words at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 23 are especially important. "Our days, the days of the survivors, are numbered. But we will not fall silent if you, all of you, do not remain silent." Turski and his family had been imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland since 1942, before being sent to the concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz in 1944. After his liberation, Turski worked as a journalist in Warsaw. He was a co-founder of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The International Auschwitz Committee is based in Berlin. The name Auschwitz has become a synonym for the Holocaust and the epitome of evil worldwide. The Nazis killed more than a million people there alone, mostly Jews. Throughout Europe, they murdered about six million Jews during the Shoah.
