During simultaneous celebrations of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day across the globe, Auschwitz survivors tell their stories online "so it doesn't happen again."
Fox News reported that commemorations for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, declared by the United Nations every January 27, have moved online due to the pandemic. Notwithstanding the barriers, survivors of Auschwitz retell the horrors they have gone through as "words of caution."
"We have to tell our stories so it doesn't happen again. It is unbelievable what we went through, and the whole world was silent as this was going on," Rose Schindler said in an interview with The Associated Press last Monday via Zoom.
According to Fox News, Schindler is from Czechoslovakia and was transported to Auschwitz in 1944 where she was selected for immediate death in the gas chambers more than once yet escaped each time. She later moved to San Diego, California.
She has been speaking about the horrors of her experience to school groups for 50 years now, and has written about it, along with her late husband's story, in a book entitled "Two Who Survived: Keeping Hope Alive While Surviving The Holocaust."
The horrors she spoke of, as per Fox News, include the "the mass murder of her parents and four of her seven siblings, the hunger, being shaven, lice infestations." Schindler continues to tell her story via zoom because of the pandemic considering she is already 91 years old.
Like Schindler, Tova Friedman shares her story as a "warning" against "the rise of hatred." Fox News said her story serves as a "sound alarm" against the increasing anti-Semitism and hatred in the world because "another tragedy may happen" if she doesn't. She cited seeing from some of the U.S. Capitol rioters of January wearing anti-Semitic messages such as "6MWE" that meant "6 million wasn't enough" and "Camp Auschwitz."
"It was utterly shocking and I couldn't believe it. And I don't know what part of America feels like that. I hope it's a very small and isolated group and not a pervasive feeling," she said.
The mob violence, as per Fox News, shocked her because she believes in "the essential goodness" of Americans and of America that she describes as a "country of freedom" and "a country that took" her in. She compared anti-Semitism to the coronavirus that if not stopped is "going to kill humanity."
According to the website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which was a former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, over 1.1 million men, women, and children lost their lives there.
Fox News revealed that the vast majority of those who died in the arms of German Nazis in Auschwitz under this 1.1 million registry were Jews while others were "Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war." While a total of six million European Jews from across Europe were killed by the Germans.
During this year's commemoration celebrations, victims were honored in various ways beside the online celebrations conducted by several organizations and government entities.
Fox News cited the COVID-19 vaccination given to hundreds of survivors in Austria and Slovakia as a "gesture both symbolic and truly lifesaving given the threat of the virus to older adults." Then there was the deal signed by Luxembourg "agreeing to pay reparations and to restitute dormant bank accounts, insurance policies and looted art to Holocaust survivors."
