Author: Emi Baruch
On January 27, 80 years ago, Red Army soldiers reached the wire fences of one of the most sinister concentration camps created by the Nazis - Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they found people who did not look like people. The picture is shocking, it is beyond the limits of human imagination for bestiality and cruelty.
Despite the attempts of the SS to cover up the traces of their atrocities, some of their meticulously written reports about what they did survive. The statistics that give the most complete idea of the scale of what was done are a report on the three tons of women's hair collected from three camps.
"No one will be forgotten!" Is it?
In 2005, January 27 was declared an international day of remembrance in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. And every time during this ceremony, those present hear "Never again!".
This year, heads of government delegations are once again gathering for a memorial service at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial complex, but there will be no political speeches or official addresses from guests. The only ones who will stand in front of the microphone are the few who survived the Nazi terror. "We want to focus on the last survivors among us, on their history, their pain, their trauma and their way of offering us some difficult moral obligations for the present". The words are from Piotr Czywinski - director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
We are all familiar with the mountains of shoes, the systematic sorting of objects - suitcases, backpacks, glasses, bags, underwear, coats, hats... The last luggage of hundreds of thousands of people who got off at the last station on their earthly journey.
People did not think about the future, perhaps they did not think about the past either. Some survival instinct guided them in the geography of the only reality of the time.
Only when the war was over, only when the wire fences remained behind them, did some future begin to peek into their half-awake consciousness. To take a step towards it, they had to step over piles of shoes, hair, suitcases, bags... And then they promised themselves that no one would be forgotten and nothing would be forgotten. Is it?
Isn't it brutal that behind Herbert Kickl, who calls himself "the people's chancellor", lurks the shadow of the famous Austrian Nazi Anton Reinthaler, who founded the Austrian Freedom Party. Isn't it shocking that a few days ago, the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, blew up social media with a semblance of a Nazi salute?
Last year, on the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, EC President Ursula von der Leyen said: "The unprecedented surge in anti-Semitic acts we are witnessing across Europe reminds us of the darkest moments in our history".
The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is taking place in an environment of an increasingly widespread spread of hateful platforms in the world - racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism. Today, far-right, populist and national-conservative parties have a decisive voice in seven EU member states.
And probably for the first time in the post-war period, the memory of the survivors and their stories of what they experienced are starting to fade and cease to be a moral guide for our civilization. Will Auschwitz remain a symbol of the greatest fall that educated people have ever reached? Or will it continue to exist as one of the topos of history in the bloodiest century, to which the world protocolically turns only on January 27?
Populist politics and hate speech on social media pose a huge threat to modern societies.
Latent anti-Semitism in Bulgaria
In Bulgaria, the number of cases of anti-Semitic manifestations is not only increasing, but also literally exploding after October 7, 2023. The reasons for this are not limited to one of the most complex conflicts of our time - the war in the Middle East, whose dramatic escalation began on October 7, 2023 and led to a bloodbath and thousands of innocent victims on both sides.
Latent anti-Semitism is a fact, the presence of which we can see in inscriptions on street facades, in television commentaries, in the negationist selection of some publishers, and sometimes in history classes. This is happening in a country that has not worked on the memory of either fascism or communism and that has hidden behind a national myth convenient for all political regimes. This myth marked the commemorative celebrations on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the salvation of Bulgarian Jews. President Rumen Radev, state institutions and helpful researchers spread half-truths about real and imaginary saviors and aggressively rejected all calls to find the right words to speak about the Jews deported by the Bulgarian army from the Aegean Sea, Thrace and Pirot. Which the French historian Nadège Ragaroux aptly summarizes with the words "The Holocaust is in Europe, and Salvation is in Bulgaria".
And this is not just a matter of concealment and silence, but a perfidious and effective form of disturbing interpretation and substitution of facts. One of the most outrageous pieces of evidence is the symbolic rehabilitation of legionnaires and war criminals. On the memorial to the victims of communism in Bulgaria, located next to the National Palace of Culture, there are inscribed not only martyrs of communist repressions, but also names of fascists and executioners. Among them is one of the most outspoken anti-Semitic politicians in Bulgaria, Alexander Belev - the head of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, the man whose signature is under the agreement for the "final solution of the Jewish question" in Bulgaria. And since it is a day of remembrance, let us ask ourselves the question - does being an executioner make you a martyr and a victim?
On January 27th, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial complex, the few survivors will stand again under the inscription "Work makes you free". I wonder if they realize that almost everything has already been forgotten?