On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops marched into Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s deadliest concentration camp, and ended five years of horror.
Seventy-five years later, to the day, almost 200 survivors of Auschwitz marched through its notorious gates once more to mark the anniversary of the arrival of the Red Army.
By the time the Soviets got there in 1945, the Nazis had fled.
Knowing it was only a matter of time until they were overrun, the Nazis had tried to cover up their crimes and then scattered, leaving more than 7,000 prisoners , including about 700 children, on their own.
Between 1940-45, the Nazis sent about 1.3 million people to Auschwitz . About 1.1 million people were murdered there — about a million of them Jews, 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 25,000 others.
Today, the ranks of the survivors of that living nightmare are thin, almost gone forever.
The former inmates who, as children, saw their families wiped out by their captors, are now at an advanced age and feeling an urgency to remind the world of the suffering they lived through so that it may never happen again.
For the 75th anniversary ceremony, most likely their last, they were not just honored guests among countless dignitaries, but speakers raising their voices to some of the world’s most influential people.
The stories of the survivors are as difficult as they are important to listen to.
Yvonne Engelman, 92, visited from Australia. She recalled her trip to Auschwitz by cattle car from what was then Czechoslovakia and being immediately stripped, shaved, and sent to the gas chamber. She only survived because of a malfunction that day, and she later survived forced labor and a death march. Her parents did not survive Auschwitz.
“I have no graves to go to and I know my parents were murdered here and burned,” she told the Associated Press . “So this is how I pay homage to them.”
Many told similar stories of separation from their parents, never to see them again.
Lois Flamholz was 16 when she arrived at Auschwitz and she recalled how she and other girls separated from their families pleaded with guards, asking when they would see their mothers again.
“‘Oh, you wanna see your mothers? You see the smoke over there? That’s where your mothers are,'” she recalled being told.
Flamholz missed out on the liberation of Auschwitz as she was moved to a work camp and then, in February 1945, sent on a six-week march. She was eventually saved by the British at Bergen-Belsen.
Marian Turski, 93, addressed the crowd at the ceremony with a reminder that the Holocaust didn’t happen suddenly.
“Auschwitz did not descend from the sky,” he said, echoing Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen.
He noted that the Nazis’ assault on the Jews began with small steps, like banning them from sitting on benches, which eventually evolved into ghettos and death camps.
“The 11th commandment is: Thou shalt not be indifferent,” Turski implored.
“Because if you are indifferent, you will not even notice it when upon your own heads, and upon the heads of your descendants, another Auschwitz descends from the sky.”
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“Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against,” Turski said. “Democracy hinges on the rights of minorities being protected.”
Even to mark the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, the trip wasn’t easy for the survivors.
British survivor Renee Salt, 90, says she’s been back to Auschwitz several times, and she hates it every time. “I can’t even begin to tell you how much I hate it. I get so nervous, it feels terrible,” she told The Guardian .
However, she knows it’s important, and that this was likely her last visit. “I feel I have to. If I survived, I need to come back to show people what happened,” she said.
Salt, like so many others, fears that although the Holocaust is a well documented crime, people will forget about it when the survivors are all gone.
Indeed, Salt fears that the world might already be too far along. “I know that the world hasn’t learned from our experience. It’s forgetting.”
Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, feels similarly.
He noted that when “the world finally saw pictures of gas chambers, nobody in their right mind wanted to be associated with Nazis. But now I see something I never thought I would see in my lifetime, the open and brazen spread of anti-Jewish hatred.
“Do not be silent! Do not be complacent! Do not let this ever happen again — to any people!” he said.
h/t: ABC News , The Guardian , Associated Press
