Our view: Let us not forget Auschwitz-Birkenau
Published 7:00 pm, Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Their names stand as grim reminders of man's inhumanity.
And, perhaps the most infamous of the infamous, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was 60 years ago today that soldiers from the Soviet Red Army captured Auschwitz-Birkenau, liberating some 7,000 survivors. Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews from across Europe, already had died at Auschwitz, victims of Hitler's "final solution." At least 6 million Jews died in the Nazi extermination camps, as well as several million others deemed undesirable by the Nazis - Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents.
Sixty years later, it still seems difficult to comprehend how so many could have been exterminated.
"Everyone is surprised such a thing happened, but it did," Josep Borrel, president of the European Union parliament said in ceremonies today at Auschwitz.
Sixty years later, many of the men who liberated the death camps have departed this world, leaving fewer with a first-hand knowledge of what happened.
"You are the last generation that can talk to the survivors. We are every day less," Trudy Spira, who was deported to Auschwitz as an 11-year-old, told reporters.
The message taken from Auschwitz is "Never again."
"I would like to say to all the people on the earth: Unite, and do not permit this evil that was committed," 92-year-old Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, commander of the Red Army unit that captured Auschwitz, said today. "This should never be repeated, ever."
That should be the message that we reflect upon today, even as we hear echoes of the "final solution" in places like the former Yugoslavia and Sudan, where goverments in just the past decade have attempted to exterminate those they deemed undesirable.
We are not doomed to repeat the inhumanity of history. But to avoid seeing this horror again, we must all vow that such a thing will never happen again.
To do less would be to dishonor those who died - and those who survived - the Nazi extermination camps.