International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is World Holocaust Day.

The day has been commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Among those liberated was the Italian-born writer and chemist Primo Levi.

Levi was one of the estimated 900 Jews left in the Judenlager (Jewish camp) on Auschwitz IV on that January day in 1945 when the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated the remaining inmates at the German death camp.

The previous day the Red Army began encircling the German Army in East Prussia, which was the beginning of the end of German power in East Prussia.

January 27, 1945 was a Saturday. The sun was shining on snow-covered Auschwitz.

The Russian cavalry men announced: 'Germania kaputt!'. They dismounted, showed the red star on their uniforms and said: 'Ruski, Ruski'. But they looked embarrassed, even revolted by what they saw. 

The Jews in front of them had been starved and had the furtive gaze and gestures of hunted animals. Primo Levi covered his head in shame.

In 1947 Levi wrote a memoir of his time at Auschwitz. If This is a Man shows how the Germans working at the camp as well as the prisoners had been dehumanised by their presence in the camp.

When we call the perpetrators of these atrocities Nazis there is always the possibility that we remove them from the human race. Better to call them by their nationality. The overwhelming majority of them were Germans, though peoples in the countries they enslaved, also worked for and with them.

The frequent admonishments in post-war Germany to 'mourn and master the past' struck Levi as pietistic and hollow.

In a letter he wrote in reply to one of the 'kinder German guards' at Auschwitz Levi wrote: "I would like to help you come to terms with your past but I doubt that I am able."


(Some material in the above is taken from an article by Ian Thomson in The Tablet.)