Bundestag commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp 79 years ago

The Bundestag commemorated the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp 79 years ago with moving speeches. Survivor Eva Szepesi reported on the horrors of the past – and built a bridge to the present.

This morning the Bundestag commemorated the victims of National Socialism. Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi complained about the resurgence of anti-Semitism. She called for opposition and a commitment to democracy and against right-wing extremism. “Never again is now,” she said to sustained applause from the full audience.

The sports journalist Marcel Reif, who was born in Poland in 1949, then spoke as a representative of the second Shoah generation. His father barely survived the Holocaust.

Bas: “Holocaust never disappeared for survivors”

Bundestag President Bärbel Bas remembered the six million murdered Jews in Europe, the Sinti and Roma as well as “the people persecuted because of their political convictions, their Christian faith or as Jehovah’s Witnesses”, the queer people and the victims of so-called euthanasia. Bas emphasized that the Holocaust never disappeared from the lives of the survivors. “It fills me with shame that for a long time no one wanted to listen to the survivors.”

Reference to Hamas terror and its consequences

Szepesi, who survived Auschwitz as a child, recalled Hamas’ October 7 terror in Israel as the worst attack on Jews since the Nazi era. He also fueled anti-Semitism again in this country.

She now has to speak in schools under police protection. The Shoah began with words, “with society’s silence and turning a blind eye,” she warned. They are shocked that right-wing extremist parties that threaten democracy are being re-elected. “Those who remain silent are complicit.”

Szepesi had previously described from his own experience how exclusion, persecution and deportation began with the introduction of the Nazi racial laws. She described the loss of her parents and relatives, her deportation in a cattle car to Auschwitz, and the brutal and humiliating abuse as a twelve-year-old child in a concentration camp in an equally impressive and depressing way.

50 years of silence

After the war her life path took her to Germany. Here she remained silent about her story for 50 years. “I can’t hate, I’ve received too much love for that,” she emphasized. Now her life’s mission is to “speak for everyone who can no longer speak,” said the 91-year-old.

Reif warned Germany not to waste its second chance after the Holocaust. The “big demonstrations by the upright give me hope,” he emphasized. After the war, his family moved back to Germany, the “land of the perpetrators,” via Poland and Israel. His father remained silent about the Holocaust for a long time. He didn’t ask himself – for fear of hearing something unbelievable. The father wanted to protect the children from the terrible shadows of the past.

Mature: “Be human”

At some point, however, he realized that his father had communicated his life experiences to him, namely in the sentence: “Be a human being.” He also wants to pass on this “legacy” to parliamentarians.

Students from the Berlin University of the Arts framed the memorial hour with pieces by artists who were persecuted or murdered during the Nazi era.

Since 1996, the Bundestag has commemorated the liberation of the survivors of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp by Red Army soldiers on January 27, 1945.