“It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything,” said Holocaust survivor Jona Laks, 94, about her return to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“But it’s necessary,” she said. “It’s necessary for the world to know.”
Monday marks Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp complex, where Laks spent more than a year when she was only about 12 years old.
She and her twin sister, Miriam, experienced horrors in the inhumane medical experiments of SS physician Josef Mengele. Laks was initially lined up to be murdered in gas chambers, but her older sister saved her by shouting that the twins should not be separated.
“As time passes over, things are being forgotten,” Laks said, noting that few are left from her generation to speak out. “The world hasn’t learned its lessons from what happened, from what was done.”
Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at the concentration camp from 1940 to 1945, many of them Jews but also other victims of the Third Reich including Poles, the Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.
Michael Bornstein, who survived for seven months inside Auschwitz as a child, said that “nothing will be easy about returning” to the site.
World leaders are also gathered in Poland to mark the camp’s liberation, including Britain’s King Charles, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. But none will speak at the event, which instead aims to focus on the voices of survivors.
All of Auschwitz’s remaining survivors are invited to the commemorations and can bring one person for support.
“We are fully aware of how physically demanding and emotionally taxing attending the commemoration event at the site of the former camp can be for them,” the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum said in a statement.
One of the symbols of the 80th anniversary is a freight train car, which will be placed directly in front of the main gate. The train car is dedicated to the memory of the approximately 420,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz.
The United Nations declared January 27 as the International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2005. Observed annually, it marks the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and remembers the six million Jews who lost their lives under the Nazis.
Germany’s Scholz said in a Monday statement: “Sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, friends, neighbors, grandparents: more than one million individuals with dreams and hopes were murdered in Auschwitz by Germans. We mourn their deaths. And express our deepest sympathy. We‘ll never forget them. Not today, not tomorrow.”
The museum says the event at Auschwitz offers the chance for shared commemoration and global reflection.
It comes at a time of mounting antisemitism in Europe, fueled by conflict in the Middle East which saw Israel launch a war on Gaza in response to terror attacks carried out by Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023.
There has been an increase in antisemitic incidents in Europe since October 2023, with some Jewish community organizations reporting an increase of more than 400%, according to a survey from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), published in June.
Of those surveyed by the FRA, 76% say they hide their Jewish identity at least occasionally and 34% avoid Jewish events or sites due to feeling unsafe.
“Europe is witnessing a wave of antisemitism, partly driven by the conflict in the Middle East. This severely limits Jewish people’s ability to live in safety and with dignity,” FRA Director Sirpa Rautio said.
Events in the Middle East have also prompted a surge in Islamophobic incidents across Europe, including arson, verbal and physical abuse and the targeting of mosques.