MESSAGE OF AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR HALINA BIRENBAUM
AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR
So many thoughts, feelings and memories spring to mind and lips today, on another anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp! There is still so much to share with the world, explore, and recall! The countless experiences of infinite suffering on the brink of death are already a distant, unimaginable story for new generations...
In today's world, full of current pressing problems, severe conflicts, new deadly diseases, pandemics, humanity is less and less absorbed by the Holocaust. The enormity of human lives lost, suffering in vain, torture inflicted, and the death of the innocent. Time and ignorance can efface their traces, understanding of today's threats and undertaking the necessary actions.
People who survived these ordeals remembered them forever and tried with all their might to document them for the world to preserve in human memory and warn against their recurrence are passing away. New generations are born and grow up for whom this history is distant and old as if it does not concern them. Especially as they are so nightmarish that one would rather run away from the sorrows and tragedies than delve into them... People want to forget, belittle, deny their existence, and falsify history! But to ignore the criminal facts of this war and Holocaust is to renew this terrible threat!
I watch with growing horror and pain at the noisy, unpunished marches of hatred against another, the Jews and people fleeing for refuge from the rampant terror in their countries of origin. We know all too well the screams of bloodthirsty, stupefied, hate-filled youngsters and others before Auschwitz with a chorus of "Death to the Jews!" resounding boldly again in the authorised street marches.
And in the aftermath...? Gas chambers, frightening death for millions. My family, loved ones and I were miraculously omitted but lived through it day by day over two years at Majdanek, in Auschwitz. I could still see the fire from their bodies, breathe the suffocating smoke hanging over the entire Auschwitz camp.
The slogans meant and mean: "Death to the Jews!" Death! Death! To other people.
Death at the end awaits and will take us all away because of age, accidents in normal times, increasing wonders of technology, the glories of human reason and knowledge, including genius. Death from diseases - from one such recent one with multiple mutations, with a supposedly very "noble" name: CORONA (CROWN) The international bearer of mass deaths in all countries and languages sounds the same to nationalist haters in Poland, Israel, everywhere in this human or non-human world. The death proclaimed and heralded in marches by ferocious alleged "patriots", or the silent, invisible death from a kiss, a close-up sneeze, a cough: now on a massive scale from a coronavirus with mutations...!
I was ten years old when the Germans invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939, thirteen years old when I was dragged to Auschwitz-Birkenau after being led out of the gas chamber of the Majdanek camp thanks to a malfunction. I saw masses of the powerful but arrogant army of Nazi Germany as they marched cruelly, victoriously, into the devastated and burning streets of Warsaw. For more than five years, I breathed the crimes of Nazi Germany, death. I grew up under their criminal and absolute rule, which did not spare anyone, Jews or Poles. The Jewish people were condemned and executed by the German Nazis by all possible means and under a plan of total extermination.
And after five years of this horrible murder, I saw in the "Death March" from Auschwitz to the camps in the already losing war by Germany those arrogant, powerful, "pure Aryan race" Nazi enforcers of "Death to the Jews!" wounded, crippled in dirty bloodied bandages, fallen to the ground returning to their broken homes and families in their homeland.
It is worth knowing before you set off on these kinds of racist demonstrations, hate marches, what they end up being and what price you will have to pay for them.
In all these years since my liberation from this hell on earth, I have not stopped recounting my experience then, what I was a victim of and an eyewitness to. Throughout my long life, I have carried the image of my lost family, mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and companions of destiny in the ghetto, at Majdanek, Auschwitz, in the camps in Germany. The sight of their infinite sufferings and mass deaths is etched in my soul like the number tattooed on my arm in Auschwitz. Today, I reflect with great regret that I have accomplished too little with my fervent messages from those years of war and extermination of my Jewish people from Poland and all the countries of Europe. For a long time, people were reluctant to listen, believe us and imagine for themselves until most of the survivors had departed from this world - until it became too late, and they could carry on boldly, brazenly, and unpunished with these arrogant marches of hatred and deafening screams of "Death to Jews, Death to foreigners, Death to refugees!!!". DEATH! To other people.
It will come. No one will be spared. No one lives forever, neither the strong nor the weak - only REMEMBRANCE. It is the ONLY eternal thing from Generation to Generation.
Birenbaum VR
I wanted and still, wish that every victim of the Shoah and the criminal machinery of hatred will remain in the memory of generations around the world. I want the memory and knowledge of the Holocaust to protect us from further tragedies and ensure that we successfully counter new threats in every corner of the globe. Therefore, I am filled with hope that the latest Internet technology and painstaking efforts of the Auschwitz Birkenau State Memorial Museum, Director Piotr Cywiński and his dedicated team will soon make it possible for the knowledge and memory of the Holocaust to be present in schools all over the world through live Internet transmissions.
Today, at 92 years old, it's excellent news for me. But above all, for humanity as a whole.
Halina Birenbaum