Holocaust survivors fear Europe is forgetting the lessons of Auschwitz

“Seeing a concentration camp with my own eyes and listening to a survivor who went through it all, that’s really brought it home. It’s important for young people like me. We’ll soon be able to vote. The far right is gaining more and more support in Germany and we need to learn from the past.”

Xavier is a 17-year-old German student. I met him at a Holocaust education centre in Dachau, in southern Germany, just around the corner from what was once a Nazi concentration camp of the same name. He and his classmates were spending two days there, learning about their country’s Nazi past and debating its relevance in today’s world.

Eighteen-year-old Melike admitted she didn’t know much about the Holocaust before coming to Dachau. Listening to Eva Umlauf, a survivor, talk about what happened, touched her heart, she said.

She wished racism and intolerance were spoken about more frequently. “I wear a headscarf and people are often disapproving. We need to learn more about one another so we can all live well together.”

Miguel warned of growing racism and antisemitism on social media platforms, including jokes about the Holocaust. “We need to prevent that,” his 17-year-old friend Ida chimed in.

“We are the last generation who can meet and listen to people who survived that tragedy. We have to make sure everyone is informed to stop anything like that ever happening again.”

They are earnest and hopeful. Some might say naive.

Here in Europe, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, societies seem increasingly divided. There’s a rise in support for political parties, often, but not exclusively on the far right and far left, that are quick to point at the Other. The outsider. The unwanted. Be they migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people or Jews.

“I want everyone to live together, Jewish, Catholic, black, white or whatever,” says Eva Umlauf, the Holocaust survivor who made such an impression on the German teens.

She describes the Holocaust as a warning of what can happen when prejudice takes over.

“That’s why I dedicate my time to talking, talking, talking,” she says. Now in her 80s, she was the youngest inmate to be freed from the Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz, eight decades ago this Monday. She has written a book about her experiences and, alongside working as a child psychiatrist, she speaks often about the death camps and antisemitism, to audiences at home and abroad.

“Death Mills” is the title of a US war department film, shown to German civilians after the war, edited from allied footage captured when liberating the around 300 concentration camps run by the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.

Skeletal naked people, with shaven heads and hollow eyes, shuffle and stumble past the camera. One man gnaws at a fleshless bone, clearly desperate for food. Piles of dead bodies are strewn in all corners; emaciated faces forever twisted in open-mouthed screams.

While in warehouse after warehouse, you see carefully labelled gold teeth, reading glasses and shoes belonging to murdered men, women and children. And bundles of hair shaved from female inmates, packed and ready for sale for Nazi profit.

The Nazis used concentration and death camps for the slave labour and mass extermination of people deemed “enemies of the Reich” or simply “Untermenschen” (subhumans). These included, amongst others: ethnic Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, others labelled as homosexuals and the biggest target of all: European Jews.

In total, six million Jews were murdered in what became known as the Holocaust. Numbers have been calculated based on Nazi documents and pre- and post-war demographic data.

The legal term “genocide” was coined and recognised as an international crime, following the world’s realisation of the extent, and grim intent, of Nazi mass murder which continued with fervour even as they were losing the war. It refers to acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Auschwitz is probably the best-known Nazi camp. Its horrors have come to symbolise the Holocaust as a whole. 1.1 million people were murdered there, among them, a million Jews. Most were poisoned en masse in gas chambers. Their bodies burned in huge crematoria. The ash given to local farmers for use in their fields.

“I was too young to realise much of what was going on at Auschwitz,” Eva told the students. “But what my mind has forgotten, my body remembers.”

The teens listened intently. No-one fidgeted or glanced at their smartphones, as Eva explained she had the number A-26959 tattooed in blue ink on her arm.

Being forcibly tattooed was part of the “process” for every prisoner arriving at Auschwitz who wasn’t immediately gassed to death and instead was selected for forced labour or medical experimentation.

“Why did they choose to tattoo a two-year-old baby?” Eva asks. She says she finds just one answer to that question: that the “superhumans” – the Nazis believed they were creating a superior race – did not think that Jews were human beings.

“We were rats, subhumans, totally dehumanised by this master race. And so it did not matter to them if you were two years old, or 80 years old.”

Recounting the trauma she inherited from her young mother, the loss of every family member from before the Holocaust and the loneliness she felt postwar as a little girl with no grandma to hug her or bake cakes with her, Eva at one point begins to cry silently. Especially when she plays a video of her recently taking part in the annual “March of the Living” at Auschwitz, where survivors walk alongside youngsters from all over Europe, with the mantra “Never Again”.

As they watch her, a number of the teens in Eva’s audience have tears rolling down their cheeks too.

But a short drive away, in the Jewish community centre of Munich, which is guarded by armed police, acting president of the Jewish Community Charlotte Knobloch tells me how worried she is about spiralling modern-day antisemitism.

Born in the early 1930s, Ms Knobloch remembers holding her father’s hand and watching Jewish shop windows smashed and synagogues in flames on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass in November 1938, when the Nazi regime carried out mass acts of violence against Jews and their property, while most non-Jewish Germans either cheered or looked the other way.

She says antisemitism never disappeared entirely after the war, but she hadn’t believed things would become as worrying again as they are now. Even in Germany, she says, which historically has done much to confront its Nazi past and to be vigilant against antisemitism.

It’s an assertion supported anecdotally by members of the Jewish community in Germany and elsewhere who say they now fear wearing a Star of David in public and prefer not to have a Jewish newspaper delivered to their homes, for fear of being labelled “a Jew” by their neighbours.

Studies by the Community Security Trust in the UK and the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency tell the same story. The FRA says 96% of Jews interviewed across 13 European countries report experiencing antisemitism in everyday life.

Jewish communities in South America note a significant uptick in antisemitism too, while in Canada, a synagogue was firebombed a few weeks ago and there was a shooting incident at a Jewish school. In the US last summer, Jewish graves were desecrated in the city of Cincinnati.

Former President Joe Biden identified global antisemitism as a foreign policy concern. Academic Deborah Lipstadt, who was his special envoy for monitoring and combating it, highlights antisemitism online – often along with Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination – which she says are manipulated by outside actors like Russia, Iran and China to sow division in society and to further their own goals and messaging.

She also speaks of a global rise in antisemitism following Israel’s military response in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – after the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people inside Israel on 7 October 2023.

Prof Lipstadt says Israel’s military actions are often blamed on Jewish people in general. All Jews cannot be held responsible for the decisions of the government of Israel, she says. That is racism.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which collects information on antisemitic incidents in Germany, lists an incident last month where red-lettered graffiti was daubed on a church and the town hall in the town of Langenau, calling both for a boycott of Israel and the gassing of Jews – a reference to the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz and the Holocaust didn’t begin with poison gas. Their roots were in the othering of Jews that goes back centuries in Europe.

The CEO of the Conference of European Rabbis, Gady Gronich warns the targeting of minorities is now again becoming mainstream. The Muslim community is bearing the brunt right now, he says, also describing himself as shocked at the levels of antisemitism he sees.

He thinks 80 years on from World War Two, some are intentionally choosing to leave the Holocaust and the responsibility to learn from it in the past.

But the past will not be silenced. Near the Polish city of Gdansk, under snow-covered leaves covering the forest floor, you still find the discarded remains of shoes, belonging to victims of the Holocaust.

There are soles so tiny, partially buried under the earth, their murdered owners must have been young children. The stitching on some bits of leather are still plain to see. Millions of shoes were sent here to a leather factory, run by slave labour at what was then Stutthof concentration camp.

The shoes came from all over Nazi-occupied territory. But mainly, it’s believed, from Auschwitz.

“For me, these shoes are screaming. They are shouting: we were alive 80 years ago!” Polish musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski tells me. He’s a long-time campaigner for the shoes to be salvaged and put on display, alongside others already in the concentration camp museum. The shoes’ message is anti-war and anti-discrimination, says Gregor. And should be heard.

“These shoes belonged to people. You know, they could be our shoes, right? Your shoes, or my shoes, or my wife’s shoes, or my son’s shoes. These shoes are asking for attention, not only to preserve them, but to change ourselves (as human beings) in a moral way. I was pretty sure things would be very different in 2025 to how they are.”

This year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz is seen as particularly significant. It’s possibly the last big anniversary that eyewitnesses and survivors will be alive to tell us what happened – and to ask us: what are we remembering today and which lessons have we already clearly forgotten?