FROM AUSCHWITZ – The extremely impressive scenic design is worthy of the best traditions of Polish theatre: to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the museum’s organisers had a huge light grey hyper-technological marquee built for 2,000 people, which encompasses the turret and the two red brick buildings on both sides that were the entrance to Birkenau camp. Under that arch the trains passed carrying the deportees to the shelter where “selection” took place. A track drawn in the floor of the central corridor ends with a freight car standing there, like a beast stuck in a trap.
On a day of beautiful sunshine, which left only a few isolated puffs of snow on the camp, some fifty survivors, presidents (including Mattarella, Macron, Trudeau, Metsola), politicians, royalty (Great Britain, Holland...), representatives of various foundations and museums, clergy of all faiths, journalists and intellectuals gathered there. Zelensky's entrance into the hall was greeted by warm applause (Red Army soldiers who first arrived at the gates of Auschwitz camp were Ukrainian). Pending the start of the ceremony, at 4 p.m., the application (financed by Google and using Israeli technology) was projected on large screens suspended in mid-air through which one can visit Auschwitz camp interactively on a computer or mobile device: “Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes”.
The ceremony did not include any remarks made by political or institutional representative: only survivors took the floor. They entered the room at the very last moment, one after the other, sometimes supported by young volunteers: all dressed elegantly, many women wearing colourful hats. The first one who spoke, in a sense on behalf of everyone else (the few alive as well as the millions dead) was famous Polish journalist and historian Marian Turski (1926). He started his remembrance speech (which also includes the many Poles, Gypsies and those of other peoples and cultures who were murdered at Auschwitz camp) with these words: “Our thoughts go out to that majority, to those millions, who will never tell us what they felt and suffered. Because they did not survive”.
He went on to tell of a female Jewish poet, who wrote in Polish, Henryka Wandal Lazowertówna (1909 - murdered in Treblinka in August 1942): “She could have escaped from the Ghetto and saved herself, but she did not want to abandon her mother. How many today would do that?”. Turski read a final letter that she wrote to a friend: “I am leaving for a distant unknown place, which does not appear on any map. The railwaymen have faces like paper. I am quiet and sad. I am no longer there”.
After asking for a minute’s silence, Turski said he had seen that nowadays the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are back: wars are multiplying. Like all four people who would take the floor later, he was keen to denounce the rise of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism that, through indifference and ignorance, led to the Holocaust. “We must not listen to the various conspiracy theories, which often bring up Jews inappropriately, nor must we be afraid of those who, like Hamas, already practice the extermination of people as Jews (...). Problems between neighbouring peoples, putting aside hatred, can be solved, even after many dramatic conflicts. A good example is given by the Germans and the French, the Poles and the Lithuanians. We need a vision of the future that is not destruction and death”.
The floor was then given to Janina Iwanska, Tove Fridman and 95-year-old gynaecologist Leon Weintraub who spoke about how he suffered anti-Semitic intolerance even after surviving the camp: in 1968, he was kicked out of Otwock hospital where he worked for being Jewish, and in 1969, he was forced to emigrate to Sweden.
Before the final remarks made by the Museum’s director, Piotr Cywinski, and a beautiful kaddish, followed by prayers from different religions, billionaire Ronald Lauder, financial supporter of the Museum and of numerous important initiatives for Jewish remembrance, took the floor. Although he is not a “survivor” (his grandparents emigrated to the United States from Hungary in the 1920s: “when I come here I always wonder: what would my destiny have been if my family had remained in Central Europe?”), he feels the danger is strong of growing anti-Semitism and the possibility exists that “even without crematoria, Jews will be targeted again for being Jews”.
Nobody mentioned the dramatic events in Gaza (for Israel, Education Minister Ioav Kisch was present) and it was hard to expect survivors to do so. However, keeping to current affairs, if one compares the very recent inauguration ceremony of US President Donald Trump with the ceremony at Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, involving perhaps more world politicians (for the US, only the special envoy for the Middle East was present), one will realise the enormous and not merely cultural distance that exists between different parts of the world: remembrance and dignity are preserved here, even common sense is shattered there.
