The lessons of Auschwitz must never be forgotten

Seventy-five years ago the world slowly awakened to the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau as Soviet troops liberated the largest Nazi death camp in occupied southwestern Poland. In Australia, the gruesome discovery was marked in our newspapers via a snippet from Reuters, understated and naive in retrospect. It noted a “terrible concentration camp” had been captured at Oswiecim, where “tens of thousands of people were tortured” and “thousands more were shot”. In reality, as Henry Ergas wrote on Monday, 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, of whom 960,000 were Jews. Here, a world away, the scale of the crimes against humanity only began to become apparent months later as other camps were liberated and newsreels were released, showing images of piled corpses, gaunt survivors, gas chambers, and rooms full of human hair and books bound in human skin.

The Shoah is passing from living memory. About half the remaining Holocaust survivors have died in just the past five years. Fiona Harari has interviewed Australian survivors, including twin sisters Annetta Able and Stephanie Heller. At Auschwitz they were forced to load naked corpses on to trucks and were subjected to Josef Mengele’s barbaric medical experiments. Life was measured in minutes. “You hoped to get out alive,” Mrs Able said. Ergas wrote of “the morning hangings, the specially designed benches on which inmates were whipped until every bone was broken, the cages in which prisoners were starved to death, the operating theatres where children were deliberately infected with disease, the gas chambers and crematoriums”.

Auschwitz must inform the world today as it confronts signs of a revival in anti-Semitism, with even the guides at the Bergen-Belsen camp reporting being heckled by Holocaust deniers. There is, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned, “a global crisis of anti-Semitic hatred, a constant stream of attacks targeting Jews, their institutions and property”. Last year there was a 21 per cent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York, of all places, with its large Jewish population. In France there was a 74 per cent rise in anti-Semitic attacks. In Britain they rose by 16 per cent to a record high as anti-Semitism gained traction within the heart of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Incredibly, after a spate of attacks on synagogues, a German government minister was so alarmed he warned Jews not to go out on to the streets wearing a kippah (religious cap). In Australia, intolerance and ignorance are behind a rising number of anti-Semitic incidents.

A UN report on anti-Semitism warned the resurgence was being fuelled by both the extreme right and extreme left — typically under the cover of anti-Israel rhetoric — and violent Islamist extremism. As former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky pointed out, global anti-Semitism from both left and right has morphed from targeting Jews simply because they are Jews, to targeting Israel and all the Jewish state stands for as it seeks to survive as the only democracy amid the hostility and hatred of the Middle East.

Yet the world collectively does little. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out at the World Holocaust Forum: “We have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet — a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state.” He was, of course, referring to Iran, and he called on the world to join in “confronting the tyrants of Tehran”. The world, however, has remained largely unmoved by his pleas, with Europe, in particular, more than happy to go on dealing with Tehran. In her book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss, a writer from Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were gunned down while praying at the Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018, warns “the world’s oldest hatred” is “migrating towards the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy”.

In January 1945, Soviet soldiers on the spot were revolted by the “crime without precedent” at Auschwitz. But the Holocaust was not an aberration. Tragically, we have again witnessed genocide, with hundreds of thousands of people killed in Rwanda, Darfur and Myanmar. Ergas wondered what evils mankind reserves for the future. “What we do know is that the moral strength to think for ourselves remains as precious and as threatened as ever,” he wrote, noting the growing pressures to bow to mass opinion and the hysteria assailing those who dare question the self-images of the age.

Auschwitz is not only a symbol of monstrous inhumanity, the miserable epitome of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil”, but must also remain a rallying point to prevent genocide. As the number of survivors dwindles by the day, ritual is replacing memory on such anniversaries. To honour them and those exterminated by Nazis not so long ago, for the sake of our common humanity and peace among peoples the lessons of the Shoah must never fade.