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Liberation Unfulfilled

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On the day that is now honored as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the liberation of Auschwitz is “celebrated.” However, it was not the end of the Holocaust.

Until the end of its existence, the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. Human life was replaced with depraved evil, and the air filled with the smoke and ash of bodies gassed and children burned alive.

The Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews continued through the death marches until the liberation of the last camps in May. But Auschwitz is the icon, and ignoring the rest allows for dangerous universalization and the erasing of the Jews.

Auschwitz is known as a symbol of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany in its pursuit of the destruction of the Jews. During less than 5 years of its existence, over 1.1 million people perished on this blood soaked earth. When the Russian army arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they liberated 7,000 survivors unfit to join the evacuation Death Marches. Among the items found by the Russians were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair. What can we do with such details?

Indeed, modern memory is quickly ignoring the dangers of forgetting the details of this chapter of history that has so many vital lessons for us today.

This very special virtual learning program for International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of 80 years since the death marches held unique meaning, as it was also the day on which Doron Steinbrecher, Romi Gonen and Emily Damari were released from captivity by Hamas in Gaza.

As an entire nation waits for the release of the rest of our family held hostage in the underground tunnels and UN hospitals and housing, we are torn as to how we can do more to use our voice.

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REFLECTION QUESTIONS:

Was it a mistake to select a date for commemorating the Holocaust that ignored the continued suffering of Jewish victims? What other date could have been chosen?

Is it important to have two memorial days - one for universal remembrance and one for Jewish observance?

Over 64% of people around the world do not know about the Holocaust, and 1 in 4 deny the historical facts. How could we increase the effectiveness of Holocaust education?

Does liberation offer any sense of freedom in a world that still calls for the genocide of Jews and the Jewish state?

TRANSCRIPT:

On the day that is now honored as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the liberation of Auschwitz is “celebrated.” However, it was not the end of the Holocaust.

The Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews was so focused and strategic that they contrived a means to further murder the remaining witnesses with minimal cost.

Between January 17-21, 1945, before the arrival of the Soviet armies, 56,000 Jews were led out of Auschwitz and its 49 sub-camps by foot, on death marches. Over 700,000 prisoners were marched hundreds of kilometers in the worst of winter conditions whereby nearly 250,000 perished or were murdered. Those who survived were interned in the camps in Germany proper - the last to be freed by the Allies.

Referred to as “the final phase of Nazi genocide”, death marches were a frequent occurrence in German territories in the final year of the Second World War. As the Allied forces pushed towards Germany from all sides, Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS began to evacuate prisoners from concentration camps in Eastern Europe to be sent by foot to the labor camps in Germany.

Such death marches had been used during Operation Barbarossa, where thousands of Soviet POWs were marched from the eastern front to Poland and Germany to be used as slave laborers, and around 76,000 Hungarian Jews were marched from Budapest to Austria Germany in March 1944. However, these marches became the primary method of continued genocide of Jews until the final liberation in May 1945.

A large share of these prisoners were sick, malnourished, and unable to keep up. Thousands died of exhaustion during these journeys, and those that failed to keep up or showed signs of weakness were murdered along the way. The longest death marches took place at the height of winter, and the already-weakened prisoners were not equipped with adequate clothing or footwear to survive in the cold.

As the Allies uncovered evidence of large-scale extermination programs, Nazi leadership ordered the transfer, dismantling, or destruction of concentration camp equipment and records in order to conceal evidence of their activities. This also included the murder of prisoners who were too weak to even set off on the death marches, and the destruction of camp records is one reason why so much information about the Holocaust and its victims has been lost.

The Nazis often killed large groups of prisoners before, during, or after marches. During one march, 7,000 Jewish prisoners, 6,000 of them women, were moved from camps in the Danzig region bordered on the north by the Baltic Sea. On the ten-day march, 700 were murdered. Those still alive when the marchers reached the shores of the sea were driven into the water and shot.

The largest evacuation was from Auschwitz on January 19, when at least 65,000 prisoners had been transferred to Germany in the second half of 1944, and an additional 56,000 to 58,000 were transferred in one week in January 1945.

More than 15,000 die during the death marches from Auschwitz alone. In Wodzislaw, the prisoners are put on unheated freight trains and deported to concentration camps in Germany, particularly to Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen.

When the camp was liberated on January 27 there were just 7,000 prisoners left behind (of 1.3 million deportees).

A few of the marches from Auschwitz were to train stations 50-60km away, although some columns of prisoners were marched much further, including the 250km march to Gross-Rosen camp.

The rapidity of the Soviet advance meant that some death marches set off with no clear destination, such as the evacuation of the Stutthof camp near Gdansk on January 25, 1945

where 7,000 prisoners were ultimately marched towards the Baltic Sea, and the 6,300 who survived were forced into the freezing water and gunned down; only 13 or 14 survived.

Other prisoners are put on a death march to Lauenburg in eastern Germany, where they are cut off by advancing Soviet forces. The Germans force the prisoners back to Stutthof. Marching in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by SS guards, thousands die during the death march. In late April 1945, the remaining living prisoners are removed from Stutthof and again, forced into the sea and shot. Over 25,000 prisoners, one out of two, die during the evacuation from Stutthof. Soviet forces enter Stutthof on May 9, 1945.

Similarly, of the 40,000 prisoners evacuated from the Gross-Rosen camp complex in February 1945, half of these were Jews from the Eulengebirge subcamp who were all murdered before or during the death marches.

With the loss of the extermination camps in Poland, death marches became one of the most effective ways of committing mass genocide. In Northern Germany, even during the final weeks of the war, it is estimated that there were upwards of 60,000 prisoners from Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, and Mittelbau-Dora being aimlessly marched around Northeast Germany in search of a safe camp.

At the end of March and beginning of April, 21,000-23,000 of the 48,000 inmates of Buchenwald were marched hundreds of kilometers to other concentration camps. Thousands of prisoners were murdered on this march. Marches started concurrently from Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Magdeburg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrueck, and a number of subcamps of Dachau. Tens of thousands died on these marches.

In total, over 700,000 prisoners were sent on death marches in the final six months of the Second World War, and 200,000 to 250,000 of these perished or were murdered during the march. After the war hundreds of mass graves with the corpses of tens of thousands of inmates who perished on these marches were found all along the routes of the marches.

April 7, 1945 - Death march from Buchenwald concentration camp

Almost 30,000 prisoners were forced on death marches away from the advancing American forces. About a third of these prisoners die, but on April 11, 1945, the surviving prisoners take control of the camp, shortly before American forces enter on the same day.

APRIL 26, 1945

Just three days before the liberation of the Dachau camp, the SS forces about 7,000 prisoners on a death march from Dachau south to Tegernsee. During the six-day death march, anyone who cannot keep up or continue is shot. Many others died of exposure, hunger, or exhaustion. American forces liberate the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. In early May 1945, American troops liberated the surviving prisoners from the death march to Tegernsee.

These are the facts often forgotten by a world willing to celebrate the liberation of one camp as if it marked the end of the nightmare that was the Holocaust.

These are the details that go forgotten amidst the universalization of a simplified rhetoric of history.

These are the issues we face in trying to prevent the discarding of Jewish human rights and memory, at the expense of a forgotten part of the final solution when thousands of potential survivors met their final days.

Elie Wiesel’s father Shlomo was one such life. Elie had recalled the death marches,"I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much," Elie wrote in his book "Night." "If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities—my body and me. I hated it."

Elie and Shlomo were later placed in open freight cars, which rolled through German towns and past German civilians. “They would stop and look at us without surprise,” Elie wrote. “One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it … Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The workers watched the spectacle with great interest.”

Elie helped his father by waking him up when he was very weak, and was about to be thrown out of the train because he was thought to be dead. “Two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands crying: ‘Father! Father! Wake up they are going to throw you outside.”

Having survived for so long, he was lost to dysentery upon arrival to Buchenwald. Sick and suffering, he was beaten by other prisoners as well as one of the guards. Sometime before Elie woke up the morning after, Elie's father was taken to the crematorium.

"I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me."

The liberation of the Jewish victims of Nazi terror was unfulfilled. Not on January 27, and not any day thereafter.

The photos of liberation are not of Auschwitz, they are of the places still bursting with imprisoned innocents and Jews they were determined to kill to the very last minute and to the very last breath.

We must remember the fateful last days in the camps to which they were marched, where death continued to dominate all life. And we cannot allow commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz to dominate the continued memory of the last painful months of persecution and momentary survival of the Jews and other prisoners of the camps not liberated until May.

We must know, understand, and speak openly about the experiences of these marches, and how they embody the continued spirit of survival that drove Jews young and old further towards the end - either of the war, or of their lives.