Holocaust survivors fear Europe is forgetting the lessons of Auschwitz
Auschwitz after the camp was liberated in January 1945
"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.
Eva Umlauf speaks to students at Dachau
"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.
'My body remembers what my mind has forgotten'
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.
Students Miguel, Melike and Martha spent two days at Dachau learning about their country's Nazi past
"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.
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