On this day eighty years ago, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated by the Red Army. This dim and ruinous time in human history claimed the lives of more than six million Jews along with millions of other people victimized by the German Nazis.
Seven thousand prisoners remained at Auschwitz-Birkenau before their liberation, but only after 1.1 million people had been murdered. While the victims were primarily Jews, the dead also included the Polish, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities.
“I speak as a Jew who has seen what humanity has done to itself by trying to exterminate an entire people and inflict suffering and humiliation and death on so many others. In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless, and nameless victims,” Elie Wiesel said in a speech delivered at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
January 27th was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly. The day is set aside to remember the victims and honor the survivors of this genocide. The former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau is now a memorial site and museum.
“Nothing will be easy about returning to Auschwitz, 80 years after I was liberated. This commemoration will be the last of its kind. We will be there. Will you stand with us?” Michael Bornstein, an Auschwitz survivor, said.
While the museum will be closed to visitors on January 26th and 27th, all Auschwitz survivors are invited to attend the commemoration. And yet, anyone from anywhere in the world can take an online guided tour.
Your reservation for “Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes” can be made here. Because it is important to bear witness.
Bear witness like the piles of shoes I saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in January of 2020 as part of my D. Min program at Wesley Theological Seminary, which centered the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Howard Thurman for a spirituality that transforms communities. Just above the massive container are these words from the Yiddish poet Moshe Szulsztein:
“We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are the shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each of us avoided the hellfire.”
The poem, aptly titled “We are the Shoes,” gives new meaning to the invitation-turned-idiom to “walk in someone else’s shoes.” This effort to understand another person’s perspective and experiences would, in this case, be deadly.
“I believe it is imperative that we affirm our common humanity often, even as we celebrate our respective differences with members of other ethnic, social, economic, and political communities. The urgency that accompanies this appeal to affirm a common humanity arises out of a recognition that the first step towards the kind of atrocities perpetuated against hapless groups, historically, is invariably made when we forget the commonalities that bind us together as members of one human family,” Dr. Beverly Eileen Mitchell wrote in “Plantations and Death Camps: Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity.”
Mitchell continued, “Once we no longer see ourselves as fellow human beings with a shared capacity for joy and profound sadness, for pleasure and immense pain, for exaltation and great suffering, then it is easy to take the subsequent steps that lead to mistreatment, brutality, degradation, and attempted destruction of one another.”
It is our shared human experiences that bind us together. Lest we forget, the first death of any group labeled “other” is social and marked by segregation. Thus, we must stay close to each other and within earshot to hear everyone’s stories.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. offers several ways to mark this day. “At the Museum and other commemoration sites, we remember Holocaust victims by reading their names, by lighting candles, and learning about the Holocaust. All of us can mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day by sharing the truth of the Holocaust and by confronting antisemitism and hate in our daily lives,” a statement from the Museum reads.
Also, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau with a special episode titled “Haunted by Auschwitz 80 Years Later,” and will feature three survivors. The episode will air live on January 27th at noon ET on the Museum’s YouTube page and can be viewed here. A social media kit has also been created to mark the day of liberation for Europe’s Jews who were unfortunately targeted for annihilation and can be accessed here.