Auschwitz Museum prepares for 80th anniversary of liberation
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Visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum on Oct. 8, 2024 tour barracks around a stop sign that used to warn prisoners to stay away from an electric fence. Photo: Russell Contreras/Axios
OŚWIĘCIM, Poland — The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum in Poland is preparing for the 80th anniversary of Soviet forces liberating the German Nazi camp in what many experts believe is the memorial's last major milestone with many survivors present.
Why it matters: Only a few dozen Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz remain — the youngest of the 7,000 who were liberated on January 27, 1945 — and advocates are racing to record their testimonies.
The big picture: The anniversary, which also commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, comes amid rising antisemitism worldwide and on social media.
- Emerging authoritarian leaders and new far-right governments also have some advocates worried, as survivors plead with the public to heed the warning signs.
Zoom in: The museum will hold a commemoration event at the gate to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
- One of the symbols of the commemoration will be a freight car, a model that was used to transport Jews to the camp, that will stand directly in front of the gate.
- All Auschwitz survivors have been invited to the commemoration, but officials acknowledge many are in poor health and may not be able to attend.
- The museum will livestream the event.
What they're saying: "Nothing will be easy about returning to Auschwitz, 80 years after I was liberated," Michael Bornstein, an Auschwitz survivor, said in a statement.
- "This commemoration will be the last of its kind."
Context: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum is a Polish-run museum at the site of the former concentration camp and extermination center with gas chambers.
- The Nazi regime murdered more than 1.1 million at the site, most of them Jews.
- Today, the museum gives tours of the facilities as it works on historic preservation to tell the story of the Holocaust. It attracts more than 1.6 million visitors a year.
- International Holocaust Remembrance Day seeks to bring attention to the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews.
Zoom out: Robert J. Williams, the Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, tells Axios that the commemoration provides a venue for survivors to share their voices and "really tell us the world that they want to create before the last of them leave us."
- "They emerged from the years of the Holocaust with a number of hopes...but what they've seen has dashed some of those hopes," Williams said as he headed to Poland.
Case in point: Anti-Jewish hate crimes reported to police across 20 major U.S. cities in 2023 rose 48% to a new record, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
- Elon Musk, the world's richest man, this week twice gave what scholars, journalists and rights groups said was a Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute. It doesn't seem to have done him (or his company Tesla) any visible harm, Axios' Felix Salmon reports.
What's next: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will hold its International Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration on Monday.
- The museum is encouraging people to visit and talk to Holocaust survivors who will be onsite.
- The museum will show the livestream of the commemoration ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
Worthy of your time: The USC Shoah Foundation is encouraging people to visit its Why do we remember? activity, which allows learners the opportunity to reflect on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
- The Anne Frank House of Amsterdam is opening the "Anne Frank The Exhibition" at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on the same day. The exhibit includes Frank's first photo album and handwritten verses from her friends' poetry albums.
