Auschwitz survivors marking 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camp

Oświęcim, Poland – The Soviet Red Army troops who arrived here on January 27, 1945, helped uncover one of the greatest atrocities ever committed by – and against – humanity.

Inside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, soldiers freed approximately 7,000 prisoners who had been brutalized by a Nazi regime hell-bent on exterminating the Jewish people. The horrors that defied understanding.

Eight years later, some former prisoners returned to mark the 80th anniversary of their liberation – a date known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In so many eyes around the world, the very existence of the survivors is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historical cruelty and enormous injustice of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit appeals to the world: never forget humanity’s capacity to commit unimaginable crimes.

Hitler’s regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, including approx. 1 million people at Auschwitz. The Nazis also persecuted other peoples, including Poles, Romani, Soviet prisoners, gay men, and the mentally and physically disabled.

The Nazis tried to hide evidence of the genocide they committed, including by burning the remains of approx. 900,000 Auschwitz victims who were killed in the gas chambers.

Eva Umlauf was only 2 when she and her mother were liberated from the camp – too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched on the skin—A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life along with some other Auschwitz survivors.

“You’re just a number,” Umlauf, 82, a pediatrician from Munich, told NBC News, explaining how that number forever makes her feel. “But this number is not only on the skin. This is deeper. “

For Umlauf, who traveled to the ceremony with her sister, son and one of her grandchildren, this was more than a personal journey of memory and reflection. It was a moral responsibility.

“They have to know that it is true. You know, because it’s so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that no one can believe this,” she said.

But even considering what has been established about the Third Rich’s crimes against humanity, some of the most important information has still not been uncovered. Notably, the names of more than a million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis are still unknown, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust Memorial Center.

Alexander Avram leads a team at Yad Vashem that has collected more than 2 million “Testimonial Pages” and historical documents in an attempt to verify multiple identities. The project is known as the Hall of Names.

“There are no cemeteries, there are no tombstones… for most of the Holocaust victims,” ​​AVRAM told NBC News. “Every additional name that we can recover is for us another victory against the Nazis, because the Nazis will not (only)… exterminate the Jews physically. They would wipe out even their memory. “

Avram said researchers have begun experimenting with artificial intelligence to scour statement documents in hopes of finding names that might have previously been overlooked. But this technology is useless without first-hand accounts provided by the shrinking pool of survivors.

The conference of the conference estimates that only about 1,000 survivors of Auschwitz are still alive. In that regard, Avram’s team is “rushing against time,” he said.

The anniversary comes at a troubled and troubled time. Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel, Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza and the spread of hate speech on social media have given rise to a worldwide spike in anti-Semitism.

In some countries, basic knowledge about the Holocaust is eroding.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nonprofit that helps Holocaust victims seek compensation, released An eight-country study Last week shows that 46% of adults aged 18-29 in France, for example, “had not heard or were not sure if they had heard of the Holocaust before taking the survey.”

Nearly half of Americans surveyed could not name a single Nazi camp, according to the claims conference’s findings, and more than a quarter (26%) of Americans aged 18-29 disagreed with the following statement: “The Holocaust happened , and the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust has been accurately and fairly described. “

World leadersincluding French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, flew in for Monday’s Remembrance Day. Top dignitaries, including Britain’s King Charles III, also attended.

“We really believe that this is the last milestone day where we have a visible group of survivors who are still able to tell us their stories,” Paweł Sawickirepresentative of Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museumsaid in an interview with NBC News at camp Saturday.

“The choice for this year’s anniversary was very simple: We have to put them in the spotlight,” he added.

In recent statements, Western heads of state have sought to emphasize the importance of preserving the historical memory of the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah.

“I am against turning the page and saying it was a long time ago,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a gathering of the Jewish community in Frankfurt earlier this month. “We keep alive the memory of the civilizing division of the Shoah perpetrated by Germans, which we pass on to every generation in our country again and again.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for his part, visited the grounds of Auschwitz on January 17 and described the “sheer horror” he felt there and vowed to fight the rising tide of anti-Semitism in his country.

About 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps attended Monday’s day of remembrance. In recent days, hundreds of visitors from around the world have come to the former camp to pay their respects.

Josh Sesar, a 52-year-old from Los Angeles who made his second trip to Auschwitz on Friday, said he thought it was important to see the grounds firsthand.

“I think it’s not taught enough in school in America, and if you watch the news in America now, you see the philosophies that people follow now, and they’re happy to pretend this never happened,” Sesar said .

“It’s scary because there aren’t that many survivors left, and then when there (are) no survivors, people try to discredit history even more,” he added.

Aron Krell, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and eventually freed from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, said it is incumbent on Jewish people, educators, historians and other advocates to preserve the allness of the Shoah intact.

In a video interview last week, Krell described his release as his “second birthday.”

“I saw the light again in front of me,” Krell said. “My second birthday is really more important than the first. We always celebrate: Aron Krell has two birthdays. “

Jesse Kirsch reported from Oświęcim, Poland and Daniel Arkin from New York.