Shoah’s Testament
For decades, survivors have been the most compelling voice of Auschwitz’s victims. With their passing, it becomes our duty to carry forward their testimony.
KAROL NAWROCKI
Luigi Ferri rolls up his left sleeve to reveal the camp number tattooed on his forearm: B 7525. He was only twelve years old when his carefree childhood was shattered. Though raised as a Catholic, he was deported to Auschwitz by the Germans in the summer of 1944 alongside his Jewish grandmother. She died in the gas chambers. He, against all odds, survived the camp horrors.
Ferri was one of about seven thousand emaciated Auschwitz prisoners who survived to see the liberation on 27 January 1945. In less than five years, this largest German concentration and extermination camp claimed the lives of more than 1.1 million people. Among them were 230,000 children – not only Jewish but also Polish, Romani, and of other nationalities. The tragic fate of these children is poignantly reflected in the items they left behind: shoes, clothes and toys. These objects can still be seen today in Block 5 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.
Time of Apocalypse
Hitler’s radical anti-Semitic views and his ambition to secure ‘living space’ for Germany in the East were clearly expressed in his work, Mein Kampf, already in the 1920s. At the time, however, his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was a marginal force, and his ideas were dismissed as unrealistic, if dangerous.
When Hitler assumed the role of Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, many clung to the illusion that his time in power would be brief. The National Socialists held just over a third of the seats in parliament, seemingly dependent on coalition partners and President Paul von Hindenburg. ‘In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeal,’ predicted Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Yet the Nazis swiftly dismantled all opposition and established a one-party dictatorship, aided by the brutal terror unleashed in their first weeks of power. Concentration camps, initially targeting Hitler’s political opponents and other groups deemed undesirable by the new regime, became one of the symbols of this terror. The Jewish community was subjected to escalating persecution, from economic boycotts to the disgraceful Nuremberg Laws and the violent pogroms of Kristallnacht.
These events proved to be merely a prelude to an even greater calamity, initiated by Hitler’s diabolical pact with Stalin in August 1939 and their joint invasion of Poland in September of the same year. In the occupied territories, German forces slaughtered members of Poland’s leadership class, patients in psychiatric hospitals and thousands of others at random. Jews faced an especially tragic fate – they were first confined to ghettos and then systematically murdered in death camps.
By the spring of 1940, the Germans had established the Auschwitz concentration camp. Initially, it held mostly Polish political prisoners, including clergy like the Franciscan friar Maximilian Kolbe, politicians such as the former deputy Stanislaw Dubois, and even children like 14-year-old Czesława Kwoka from the Zamość region, who was killed by a phenol injection.
Over time, Auschwitz became the central site of the Holocaust, integral to the German plan to annihilate the Jewish population. ‘Our Polish Jews were usually finished off in Treblinka or Majdanek. Jews from all over Europe were brought to Auschwitz,’ wrote Witold Pilecki, an Auschwitz prisoner and author of a harrowing report from the camp. He described transports of Jews arriving by the thousands daily, most sent directly to Birkenau, where the gas chambers and crematoria were located.
The genocide involved not only Auschwitz but also other extermination camps, such as Treblinka, Majdanek, Kulmhof, Belzec and Sobibor, as well as numerous other sites of mass murder such as Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kyiv. In just a few years, the German state and its operatives murdered around six million Jews. Israel didn’t reach a comparable population until the late 1990s.
Spokespersons for Millions
When Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary ‘architects of the Holocaust,’ stood trial in Jerusalem in the spring of 1961, prosecutor Gideon Hausner said that six million accusers stood with him. ‘Their blood cries out to heaven, but their voices cannot be heard,’ Hausner said, seeing himself as their representative.
The survivors have also long been the voices of the murdered. The first books documenting the Auschwitz atrocities were published in the 1940s. In 1945, amidst the devastation left by the Germans in Warsaw, autobiographical works emerged, including Smoke Over Birkenau by Seweryna Szmaglewska and To jest Oświęcim! [This is Auschwitz] by historian Filip Friedman. Szmaglewska had endured over two years of imprisonment in Auschwitz, while Friedman lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust.
Witnesses to history continue to speak out, sometimes after decades of trauma and silence. Luigi Ferri shared his story with Frediano Sessi, which led to the publication of Il bambino scomparso in 2022. Yet such testimonies will inevitably dwindle. Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz’s last prisoners, the remaining generation of survivors is passing away.
We – historians, educators, journalists and all people of goodwill – must, therefore, become their voice. We owe it to those who were murdered and to future generations.
KAROL NAWROCKI
President of the National Remembrance Institute.
Source: DlaPoloni.pl
