Auschwitz survivor Michael Bornstein says 鈥淣othing will be easy about returning to Auschwitz, 80 years after I was liberated. 鈥 We will be there. Will you stand with us?鈥

Bornstein’s comment, on the website, is about the Jan. 27 commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp, near Osswiecim, Poland.

Bornstein speaks to a major reason such events are important: we all have some responsibility 鈥渢o protect the lessons and legacy of Holocaust history and to defend the truth 鈥 now more than ever.鈥 The quote is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Historian Edna Friedberg of the Washington museum will moderate a virtual International Holocaust Remembrance Day program as part of the commemoration in Poland.

At Auschwitz-Berkenau, a railroad freight car will be in front of the gate of the infamous concentration and extermination camp. Here, in the 1940s, 鈥淣azis murdered 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, people of other nationalities.鈥 (80.auschwitz.org)

On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet Union soldiers liberated 7,000 survivors. The Red Army was advancing across Poland to Berlin, the capital of Hitler鈥檚 Third Reich. The Associated Press reported (in 2024) that an estimated 245,000 survivors of death camps such as Auschwitz were in 90 countries. They are overwhelmingly child survivors, born after 1928.

It鈥檚 an interesting twist that Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago. The Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom (Britain) were allies in World War II. Allies are not necessarily friends; allies may be enemies of a nation鈥檚 enemies. That was the case of the Soviet Union, America and Britain vis-脿-vis Germany.

Fascist Germany and Italy were allied with Japan. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States.

General Dwight Eisenhower (before becoming U.S. president) was the supreme Allied commander in Europe. He had studied Germany, but 鈥渨as unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp (Germany) in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive.

鈥淓ven as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horror of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.鈥 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 鈥淓isenhower鈥檚 Foresight: Protecting the Truth of the Holocaust鈥)

With 鈥淚ke鈥 at Ohrdruf were generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley 鈥 a trio of American military icons. Eisenhower cabled a report to his boss in Washington, General George C. Marshall, who became secretary of state and author of the Marshall Plan.

This Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, author Susan Eisenhower, will be on the Holocaust Museum program, speaking 鈥渁bout her grandfather鈥檚 vigilance to preserve the truth of the Holocaust.鈥

Good on Ms. Eisenhower and all who speak the truth about the Holocaust. Shame on the deniers.

Little River resident D.G. Schumacher grew up in a twice-weekly newspaper in Central Illinois and started a 60-plus-year journalism career at The Associated Press in Chicago.

Hannah Strong Oskin is the executive editor of MyHorry黑料社入口. Reach her at 843-488-7242 or hannah.oskin@myhorrynews.com. Follow her on X @HannahSOskin.

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