Getty Images“Seeing a concentration camp with my own eyes and listening to a survivor who went through it all really brought it home. This is important for young people like me. Soon we will be able to vote. The far right is gaining more and more support in Germany and we must learn from the past.”
Xavier is a 17-year-old German student. I met him at the Holocaust Education Center in Dachau, in southern Germany, just around the corner from the Nazi concentration camp of the same name. He and his classmates spent two days there, learning about their country's Nazi past and discussing its relevance in today's world.
Eighteen-year-old Melike admitted that she did not know much about the Holocaust before coming to Dachau. Hearing Eva Umlauf, a survivor, talk about what happened touched her heart, she said.
She wanted racism and intolerance to be talked about more often. “I wear a headscarf and people often disapprove. We need to learn more about each other so we can all live well together.”
Miguel warned of increasing racism and anti-Semitism on social media platforms, including jokes about the Holocaust. “We have to prevent this,” said his 17-year-old friend Ida.
“We are the last generation that gets to meet and listen to people who survived this tragedy. We need to make sure everyone is informed to stop something like this from ever happening again.”
They are serious and hopeful. Some might say naive.
Here in Europe, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, societies seem increasingly divided. There is a rise in support for political parties, often but not exclusively from the extreme and extreme left, which are rapidly moving towards each other. The outsider. The unwanted. Whether they are migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people or Jews.
“I want everyone to live together, Jewish, Catholic, black, white or whatever,” says Eva Umauf, a Holocaust survivor who made such an impression on German teenagers.
She describes the Holocaust as a warning of what can happen when prejudice takes over.
“That's why I spend my time talking, talking, talking,” she says. Now in her 80s, she was the youngest prisoner to break free from the Nazi extermination camp, before Monday's Auschwitz, eight decades ago. She has written a book about her experiences and, along with working as a child psychiatrist, she frequently speaks about the death camps and anti-Semitism, to audiences at home and abroad.
“Death Mills” is the title of the US War Department film shown to German civilians after the war, edited from Allied footage taken as they liberated some 300 concentration camps run by the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.
Skeletal naked people, with shaved heads and hollow eyes, shuffle and stumble past the camera. A man nibbles on a fleshless bone, apparently desperate for food. Piles of dead bodies are scattered in all corners; Altered faces forever twisted into gaping screams.
As you walk through warehouse after warehouse, you see carefully labeled gold teeth, reading glasses, and shoes belonging to murdered men, women, and children. And bundles of hair shaved from prisoners, packaged and ready to sell for Nazi profit.
“My body remembers what my mind has forgotten”
The Nazis used concentration and death camps for slave labor and the mass extermination of people considered “enemies of the Reich” or simply “Untermenschen” (Subhumans). These include, among others: ethnic Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, others labeled as homosexuals and the biggest target of all: European Jews.
A total of six million Jews were killed in what became known as the Holocaust. The numbers are calculated based on Nazi documents and pre-war and post-war demographic data.
The legal term “genocide” was introduced and recognized as an international crime following the world's realization of the scale and grim intent of Nazi mass murder, which continued with fervor even as they were losing the war. It refers to acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Auschwitz is perhaps the most famous Nazi camp. Its horrors have come to symbolize the Holocaust as a whole. 1.1 million people were killed there, a million Jews. Most were poisoned en masse in gas chambers. Their bodies were burned in huge crematoria. The ash given to local farmers to use in their fields.
“I was too young to realize much of what was going on in Auschwitz,” Eva told the students. “But what my mind has forgotten, my body remembers.”
The teenagers listened intently. No one got attached or looked at their smartphones as Eva explained that she had the number A-26959 tattooed in blue ink on her arm.
Being forcibly tattooed was part of the “process” for every prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz who was not immediately selected for death and was instead selected for forced labor or medical experimentation.
“Why did they choose to tattoo a two-year-old baby?” Eva asks. She says she finds only one answer to this question: that the “supermen” – the Nazis believed they were creating a superior race – did not think Jews were human.
“We were rats, subhumans, completely dehumanized by this master race. So it didn't matter to them if you were two years old or 80 years old.”
Retelling the trauma she inherited from her young mother, the loss of every family member from before the Holocaust, and the loneliness she felt post-war as a little girl without a grandmother to hold her or bake cakes with her, Eva at one point begins to crying silently. Especially when she plays a video of her recent participation in the annual “March of the Living” in Auschwitz, where survivors walk alongside young people from all over Europe with the mantra “never again”.
As they watch her, a number of teenagers in Eva's audience have tears rolling down their cheeks as well.
But a short distance away, in Munich's Jewish community center, which is guarded by armed police, the acting president of the Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, tells me how troubled she is by the spiraling spiral of modern anti-Semitism.
Born in the early 1930s, Mrs Knobloch remembers holding her father's hand and watching Jewish shop windows smashed and synagogues in flames on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in November 1938, when the Nazi regime committed mass acts of violence against Jews and their Property, while most non-Jewish Germans either cheered or looked the other way.
She says that anti-Semitism never completely disappeared after the war, but she didn't believe things would become as worrisome as they are now. Even in Germany, she says, which has historically done much to confront its Nazi past and be vigilant against anti-Semitism.
It's a claim supported anecdotally by members of the Jewish community in Germany and elsewhere who say they now fear wearing a Star of David in public and prefer not to have a Jewish newspaper delivered to their homes for fear of being labeled “Jew” by their neighbors.
Research by the UK's Community Security Trust and the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency tell the same story. The FRA says 96% of Jews interviewed in 13 European countries reported experiencing anti-Semitism in their daily lives.
Jewish communities in South America have seen a significant spike in anti-Semitism, while in Canada a synagogue was firebombed a few weeks ago and there was a shooting incident at a Jewish school. In the US last summer Jewish graves were desecrated in the city of Cincinnati.
Former President Joe Biden has identified global anti-Semitism as a foreign policy concern. Academic Deborah Lipstadt, who was his special envoy to monitor and combat it, highlights anti-Semitism online – often alongside Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination – which she says is being manipulated by outside actors such as Russia, Iran and China to sow division in society and of society and of society and of society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society and to society further its own goals and messages.
She also spoke of a global rise in anti-Semitism following Israel's military response in Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – following the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023.
“I thought things would be different in 2025.”
Prof. Lipstad says Israel's military actions are often blamed on the Jewish people as a whole. All Jews cannot be held responsible for the decisions of Israel's government, she says. This is racism.
The Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which collects information on anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, lists an incident last month in which red-issue graffiti was daubed on a church and town hall in the town of Langnau, calling for both a boycott of Israel and the gassing of the town of Langnau. calling for both a boycott of Israel and the gassing of the town of Langnau calling for both a boycott of Israel and the gassing of the town's Jews – link to the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz and the Holocaust did not start with poison gas. Their roots were in other Jews going back centuries in Europe.
The executive director of the Conference of European Rabbis, Gadi Gronich warns that targeting minorities is once again becoming mainstream. The Muslim community is currently bearing the brunt, he says, also describing himself as shocked by the levels of anti-Semitism he sees.
He considers 80 years since World War II, some deliberately choose to leave the Holocaust and the responsibility to learn from it in the past.
But the past will not be silenced. Near the Polish city of Gdansk, under snow-covered leaves covering the forest floor, you can still find the discarded remains of shoes belonging to Holocaust victims.
There are soles so tiny, partially buried beneath the Earth, their murdered owners must have been small children. The stitching on some pieces of leather is still plain to see. Millions of shoes were sent here to a leather factory run by slave labor in what was then the Stutthof concentration camp.
The shoes come from all over the occupied territory. But mainly it is believed that from Auschwitz.
“To me, these shoes scream. They scream: We were alive 80 years ago!” Polish musician Grzegorz Kwiatowski tells me. He has long campaigned for the shoes to be saved and put on display alongside others already in the concentration camp museum. The shoes' message is anti-war and anti-discrimination, says Gregor. And it needs to be heard.
“These shoes belonged to the people. You know, they could be our shoes, right? Your shoes or my shoes or my wife's shoes or my son's shoes. These shoes want attention, not only to preserve them, but to keep them but also keep them but also keep them but also keep them but also Change (as human beings) in a moral way.
This year's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz is seen as particularly significant. It is probably the last major anniversary that eyewitnesses and survivors will be alive to tell us what happened – and to ask: What do we remember today, and what lessons have we clearly forgotten?