'Never Again': Anti-Semitism Surges as Memories of Holocaust Fade

“Young people are the ones that have to carry the memory of our loved ones forever,” said Auschwitz survivor Sonia Klein, 94.

'Hate and silence led to murder': Auschwitz survivor's warning to the world

By Saphora Smith, NBC News

LONDON — The Holocaust.

The word conjures up images of brutality so profound that it is hard for the mind to comprehend. After the full horror of the Nazi efforts to exterminate Europe’s Jews became clear, survivors of the genocide have been persistent with their vocal refrain in humanity’s ear: “Never Again.”

But on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, academics and Jewish groups worry that the world’s collective memory is fading even as anti-Semitic attacks grow across the United States and Europe.

There may not be any survivors left for the 80th anniversary because so many of them are dying, warns Ronald Lauder, the chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, which helped arrange for more than 100 survivors to return to the site Monday to commemorate the day.

Lauder, who is also the president of the World Jewish Congress and a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, said the rise in anti-Semitism in the U.S. and elsewhere feels eerily like 1930s Europe as fascism swept the continent.

Image: Holocaust survivors stand behind a barbed wire fence after the liberation of Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 in Nazi-occupied Poland.Holocaust survivors behind a barbed wire fence after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. Yad Vashem Archives / Reuters file

“It’s exactly the same type of thing, it’s the same stuff said about Jews today as was said about Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s,” he said, blaming a lack of memory of the horrors of World War II and the spread of hate speech online.

It's not the lack of memory; it's much deeper than that!

According to a 2018 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference), young Americans are displaying an alarming lack of knowledge about the Holocaust.

Nearly 1-in-2 millennials asked could not name a single extermination camp, where millions of Jews were systematically killed, worked to death and experimented on by Nazi doctors.

Many today also underestimated the scale of the Holocaust, and 70 percent of American adults agreed that fewer people seem to care about it today than in the past, according to the Claims Conference, a New-York based group that negotiates with the German government for compensation for Holocaust survivors.

Image: The watchtowers of former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex in Oswiecim, PolandThe watchtowers of former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex in Oswiecim, Poland. Axel Schmidt / Reuters

In total, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, which is also known by many as the Shoah.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, more than a million people are estimated to have been murdered. The vast majority were Jews transported from across Europe to be killed in its gas chambers. Tens of thousands of others, including Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and those belonging to the Roma group were also killed at the site to the west of the city of Krakow.

Sonia Klein, who was a teenager when she arrived at the Nazis’ most notorious death camp in the spring of 1943, said the most important way to honor its liberation two years later was to ensure that as many young people as possible know what happened there.

“Young people are the ones that have to carry the memory of our loved ones forever,” Klein, 94, said.

Klein, who now lives in Brooklyn, was one of thousands of skeletal prisoners forced to walk miles in freezing conditions without proper food or clothing as the Nazis evacuated the death camp in January 1945.

She survived the death march to tell the tale but it was important, she said, to remember those who didn’t. To be forgotten was to be “murdered in vain,” she said.

Image: Pictures of prisoners are displayed in the former Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Oswiecim, PolandPictures of prisoners are displayed in the former Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Oswiecim, Poland.Axel Schmid / Reuters

Klein was joined by historians and academics in stressing that society’s understanding of the Holocaust needed to go beyond the mastering of historical facts and emphasize the values that can stop history from repeating itself.

“In another 10 to 15 years, we won’t have almost any survivors, so we need to learn how to feed the memory of the Holocaust but also the values of fighting against this phenomena in life,” said Yossi Mekelberg, a professor of international relations at Regent’s University in London, whose parents moved to Israel after surviving the Holocaust.

“Those who play with nationalism, nativism and racism, they’re playing with fire, they’re playing with our lives.”

Amos Goldberg, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who focuses on the Holocaust and its memory, said there needed to be more instruction in tolerance, anti-racism, democracy, free speech and human rights.

“Those are the things that have to be strengthened because anti-Semitism was on the rise more or less when they started to sink,” he said.

There is more on this story at NBCNews.

Keeping the Fires Burning: Poland's Government Cultivates a Siege Mentality to its Benefit

Poland's conservative government is very popular in Poland, not-so-much elsewhere. I agree with their refusal to take more Islamic immigrants and for standing up to the EU in that regard. I also agree that they were victimized by the Nazis in WWII just as France was. But France had a powerful and courageous underground that fought the Nazi occupation; I'm not aware that such existed in Poland, if it did, it should be raised in profile.

But France also had those who collaborated with the Nazis; some because it was the best thing to do for France, and some because it was expedient and opportunistic. Some in France outed Jews and sent them on their way to... Poland! No doubt, some in Poland also cooperated with the Nazis for their own benefit. This cannot be swept under the rug.

There is also the matter that antisemitism seems to have infiltrated the Polish government. While they argue that they were not responsible for the genocide of millions of Jews, their recent actions have all the earmarks of antisemitism thereby undermining their attempts to whitewash their image.

Ruling Law and Justice party is polling just under 50% approval, way up from last election in 2015

By Don Murray, CBC News 

Members of the Solidarity trade union in Warsaw protest against EU objections to a new law by Poland's right-wing government lowering the retirement age. Relations with the European Union have been tense. (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images)

How do you douse the fires of controversy? You light a new blaze right next to it. Or perhaps two.

That seems to be the approach of the Polish government in the wake of the controversy unleashed by a new law criminalizing the use of words like "Polish death camps" to describe the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews during the Second World War.

The death camps situated in Poland were not Polish, the government says, but Nazi. To say otherwise is now to break the law in Poland.

International criticism was swift

The World Jewish Congress, in addressing the law, said it had set off a "firestorm of ill will." The new Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, tried to deflect the criticism but only made things worse when he referred to "Jewish perpetrators" who had been guilty, along with others, of Holocaust crimes.

The Polish government backpedalled, suggesting the new law was in a sort of state of suspended animation while the country's constitutional court looked at it.

But to keep the flames burning, the government has put an animal rights bill before Parliament that would effectively ban the kosher slaughter of meat for religious Jews in the country and for export.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says anti-Polish sentiment around the world has been gaining power because Poles haven't reacted enough. Now it's reacting.

(Thomas Kienzle/AFP/Getty Images)

And, lighting another fire, Poland's senior senator, Stanislaw Karcewski, sent out an open letter telling Poles abroad to document any "slander" of their nation and report it.

"Please document and react to all anti-Polish hostility, expressions and opinions that harm us. Notify our embassies, consulates and honorary consuls of any slander affecting the good reputation of Poland," Mr Karczewski's letter said.

The intensity of the reaction to these moves may have surprised Poland's  governing Law and Justice party, but not overly so. It sees the outside world as hostile.

"Anti-Polonism around the world has been gaining in power because of a lack of reaction from Poland and the weakness of this reaction for the last 10 years." Those are the words of Prime Minister Morawiecki in the wake of the recent uproar.

Polish trade unionist Lech Walesa with a crowd of workers in Zyrandow, Poland, on Dec. 18, 1981. A heroic figure at the time, Walesa and his peers have lately been described by Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski as 'Poles of the worst sort' who served foreign interests. (Keystone/Getty Images)

And one of the authors of the Holocaust bill, deputy justice minister Patryk Jaki, welcomed the fight. "There comes a time when our country needs catharsis," he said.

None of this has hurt the country's leadership in the polls. On the contrary, more than half of voters say they are satisfied with the president and the prime minister and those numbers are climbing.

And the ruling Law and Justice party, profiting from a booming economy and increased social welfare payments to constituents, is polling just under 50 per cent approval. That's way above the 35 per cent it won in elections in 2015.

This right-wing Polish government cultivates a siege mentality.

To be fair, it actually is under siege — from its big political brother, the European Union. Poland is a member, one of 28, of the EU, and with a population of 38.5 million, it's a major player.

It's also a difficult player.

Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski's core conviction is that the entire Polish elite after the fall of communism in 1990 betrayed the country, a failure characterized by 'post-communist pathologies.'

(Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images)

The present government has refused to take its quota of refugees agreed to by the EU in 2016. The country, it believes, must remain Catholic and white.

It has also taken aim at its own court system after moving quickly to bring to heel the country's public television networks. They are now run by party loyalists.

The ruling party first set out to replace the country's highest judges with its own nominees. It radically lowered the retirement age for supreme court judges to 65, which would remove 40 per cent of them. It also moved to take control of the judicial council that appoints judges.

Threat of sanctions

Ministers say the legal system is too slow, with judges overpaid and infected with ideas from the past.

These moves alarmed the EU. It has taken Poland, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic, to court for refusing to respect the agreement on refugees. And for the first time the European Commission has invoked Article 7 of the EU constitution against Poland.

It argues Poland is failing to uphold the democratic norms it agreed to when it joined in 2004.

On Feb. 27, the commission renewed its threat of sanctions — the loss of voting rights and possibly European subsidies. That could be major, since Poland is the biggest EU beneficiary with a total of $100 billion in subsidies scheduled between 2014 and 2020.

"The clock is ticking," the German European Affairs Minister Michael Roth said. "The EU is very concerned about the rule of law situation."

The Polish government seems much less concerned. "Europe has run out of gas," Prime Minister Marowiecki told the German magazine Der Spiegel in February.

In the next breath he insisted Poland doesn't want to imitate Britain by leaving the union. It simply wants a more decentralized, less intrusive EU. And he offered no concessions.

That's because it knows it has an ally, Hungary, which has said it's ready to veto any attempt to penalize Poland.

The Polish government also believes it's on a mission, directed by Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Kaczynski's core conviction is that the entire Polish elite after the fall of communism in 1990 betrayed the country.

'Treason in their genes'

The last 28 years have been, in his words "a failure" characterized by "post-communist pathologies."

The men and women who led the country, including Lech Walesa, Poland's first post-communist leader, were "Poles of the worst sort" with "treason in their genes."

They set up a para-democracy serving foreign interests, he believes. The EU is a Trojan horse serving those interests. The judges his government wants to get rid of are infected with these pathologies.

The Polish Holocaust law was born from the same drive to correct the past. Poland, in the eyes of its government, was a "victim nation" and its reputation is spattered with unthinking association with death camps.

"He who controls the past controls the future," George Orwell once wrote ironically in the book 1984. It's a dictum Poland's ruling party takes completely seriously.

FBI Director Accuses Poland and Hungary of Helping With the Holocaust

FBI director's article stirred up a strong reaction. One reaction by a Washington Post columnist and the wife of the Speaker of the Polish Parliament, Anne Applebaum, follows this brief article.

FBI director James Comey

Poland has summoned the US ambassador and demanded an apology over comments on the Holocaust by FBI director James Comey.

The foreign ministry said Mr Comey had suggested in a Washington Post article that some Poles were accomplices.

That's not actually correct. What he said, (below in blue) was that there were murderers and accomplices of Germany, Poland and Hungary. Consequently, he's accusing Poland and Hungary of being as guilty as Germany. What do you think? Does the Director need history lessons or English lessons?

After the summons US envoy Stephen Mull said he made it clear the US believed "Nazi Germany alone" was responsible.

Six million Polish citizens were killed by the Nazis during World War Two, half of them Jewish.
'Falsification of history'

In the Washington Post article on Thursday, aimed at raising education about the Holocaust, Mr Comey wrote: "In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil.

"They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do."

The words sparked a storm of protest in Poland.

President Bronislaw Komorowski told Polish television the comments were an "insult to thousands of Poles who helped Jews".

Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said: "To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two. I would expect full historical knowledge from officials who speak on the matter."

Ambassador Mull, who on Sunday attended ceremonies marking the 72nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, said in a statement he had written to Mr Comey "protesting the falsification of history, especially... accusing Poles of perpetuating crimes which not only they did not commit, but which they themselves were victims of."

After Sunday's summons he added: "I made clear that the opinion that Poland is in any way responsible for the Holocaust is not the position of the United States.

"Nazi Germany alone bears responsibility. I now have a lot of work before me to make things right in this situation."

Anne Applebaum
Washington Post

Response 
Anne Applebaum
Washington Post
The Polish ambassador to Washington has protested, the Polish president has protested, the speaker of the Polish parliament (to whom I am married) has protested — and the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw has apologized profusely. Why? Because James Comey, the director of the FBI, in a speech that was reprinted in The Post arguing for more Holocaust education, demonstrated just how badly he needs it himself.

In two poorly worded sentences, he sounded to Polish readers as if he were repeating the World War II myth that most drives them crazy: Namely, that somehow, those who lived in occupied Eastern Europe shared full responsibility for a German policy. Comey put it like this:

“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.”

There are a number of problems with that pair of weak sentences, starting with the vast difference between Germany and the rest. During the war, Germany had a state policy of exterminating the Jews. This policy involved not “accomplices” but hundreds of bureaucrats, tens of thousands of soldiers, train schedules and plans. Germany also encouraged the creation of collaborationist governments in other countries – Vichy France, for example – some of which used their own police officers to send their Jewish citizens into the German death camps.

Germany also occupied Poland, but there was no Polish “Vichy.” During the war, there was no Polish state at all. Indeed, it was the absence of the Polish state that enabled the Germans to create a lawless, violent world, one in which anyone could be arbitrarily murdered, any Jew could be deported — and any Pole who helped a Jew could be shot instantly, along with his entire family. Many were. Millions of others died too – Polish intellectuals, priests and politicians were all Nazi targets.

In the course of the war, most of Poland’s infrastructure, industry and architecture were destroyed. In that atmosphere, many people were frightened by or indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and some murdered in order to avoid being murdered. But that doesn’t mean that “in their minds” they “didn’t do something evil.”

Although the circumstances were different, Germany’s leading role is equally clear in Hungary. The wartime government of Adm. Miklós Horthy did pass anti-Semitic legislation and did align itself with the Nazis. But the mass murder and deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began only in March 1944, when that government dissolved and was replaced with a straightforward German occupation. Once the Hungarian state had been dissolved, in other words, Hungary also became a lawless, violent zone where anything was possible.

So no, it is not true, as Comey made it sound, that “murderers and accomplices” in Germany, Poland and Hungary and lots of other places were somehow responsible for the Holocaust. And no, it isn’t true that the Holocaust is a story of so many otherwise “good” people who “convinced themselves it was the right thing to do.”

On the contrary, it’s a story about the power of fear, the danger of lawlessness and the horror that was made possible by a specific form of German state terror in the years between 1939 and 1945 – a terror that convinced many people to do things that they knew were terribly, terribly wrong. If the FBI director wants to take some lessons from Washington’s excellent Holocaust museum, that’s very admirable. But first he should make sure he’s understood what he’s seen.

Anne Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. She is also the Director of the Global Transitions Program at the Legatum Institute in London.