National Socialism
Holocaust survivors: Yellow stars at Corona demos mock true victims of Nazi atrocities
Commemoration of the victims of National Socialism on Thursday in the German Bundestag. At the start of the event, Bundestag President Bärbel Bas called for vigilance: “Knowledge of history hasn’t prevented a third of the German population from thinking that the Jews might have too much influence after all, that 70 percent think Israeli politics are totally or partially wrong In the Middle East, quote, it is just as bad as the policies of the Nazis in World War II and that the pandemic is acting like a fire accelerator on the hatred of Jews that is already rampant and a few anti-Semitic trolls online. It’s a problem in our society, in society as a whole. Anti-Semitism is among us.” At the memorial hour for the victims of National Socialism, the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher spoke about her memories and called for reconciliation. Auerbacher was deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 when she was seven: “As far as I know, I am the only child who returned from Stuttgart among all the deportations. 20 people from our family were murdered by the Nazis. Three years in Theresienstadt concentration camp, four years in bed because of the serious health consequences. Eight years of missing school. Four years of stigmatization of the Jews for wearing a star. Stigma because of the nasty illness that prevented partners from marrying me. I was never allowed to wear a wedding dress. I’ll never be a mom or a grandma. But I’m happy. And the children of the world are mine.” // “I close with a heart’s desire: hatred of people is something terrible. We were all born as brothers and sisters. My deepest wish is the reconciliation of all people.” On the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the memory must not fade, everyone agrees. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, together with the President of the Israeli Parliament, Mickey Levy, and Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, laid wreaths at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. On January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers liberated the Auschwitz survivors in occupied Poland. The National Socialists had murdered more than a million people there.
In Brussels and Berlin, on the occasion of the Auschwitz Memorial Day, two Holocaust survivors warned that hatred of Jews has become commonplace again in many countries around the world. A centenarian targeted anti-vaccination in particular.
Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer has expressed horror at individual opponents of vaccination in Germany who draw comparisons to the Nazi era. The 100-year-old described those demonstrators who use the so-called Jewish star as “new enemies of democracy”. “Today I see how the memory of what happened is politically abused, sometimes even ridiculed and trampled on,” she said on Thursday during a speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day in the European Parliament in Brussels. At over a hundred years old, she must see in disbelief how symbols of the Nazis’ exclusion of the Jews were shamelessly used on the street today by new enemies of democracy in order to stylize themselves as victims.
The yellow hexagram was a symbol imposed on Jews by the Nazis to stigmatize the minority. In the past, the symbol had been shown again and again by people at demonstrations against the Corona measures.
In her speech, Friedländer also spoke of her memories of the Nazi era. She described impressively how she saw people from the Auschwitz death camp for the first time. “You could hardly tell the living from the dead,” she said. She also emphasized that at that time very few people – not only in Germany – did anything to protect Jews.
Holocaust commemoration also in the German Bundestag
In the Bundestag in Berlin, too, the parliamentarians remembered the atrocities of National Socialism on Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a guest speaker, the Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher told her personal life story and thus pointed to the fate of the millions of Jews murdered by the National Socialists who did not escape with their lives “by a miracle” like she did.
“I’m a Jewish girl from the Baden village of Kippenheim,” began Auerbacher, who emigrated to New York with her parents after the war, where she still lives today. Her father was a disabled soldier of the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross. The period of persecution began for the then almost four-year-old with the November pogroms of 1938, which ended the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians in her home village.
Discrimination and exclusion followed, and in 1941 deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Most of her fellow prisoners were gradually taken from there to be murdered in Auschwitz, including her best friend. She survived until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. They didn’t want to stay in Germany after that.
“I still remember the horrible time of horror and terror,” said Auerbacher at the commemoration ceremony on the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the Bundestag. “Unfortunately, this cancer has woken up again and hatred of Jews is commonplace again in many countries, including Germany,” she warned. “This disease must be cured as soon as possible,” warned the now 87-year-old.
The President of the Israeli Parliament, Mickey Levy, took up this idea and referred to the historic location in the Reichstag building. Here you can get a glimpse of how people could use democracy to overcome it, Levy said.
“The Limits of Evil Stretched”
“This is the place where humanity has stretched the boundaries of evil, a place where a loss of values has turned a democratic framework into a racist and discriminatory tyranny,” Levy said. “And now here, within the walls of this house – silent witnesses of steel and stone – we are once again experiencing the fragility of democracy, and we are being reminded once more of the duty to protect it.”
Levy spoke of the wounds of the past, of the historical trauma and of the bridges that Israel and Germany built to overcome it – and of the heavy task of remembering the Nazi crimes that every generation must shoulder anew. When Levy recited the Jewish prayer for the dead at the end of his speech, tears came to his eyes and he could not continue. The deputies applauded for several minutes.