Oswiecim, Poland
Reuters
Daniela Szelc says she is still haunted by the screams of people and barking of dogs carrying through the night from the nearby Nazi death camp Auschwitz three-quarters of a century ago.
The 89-year-old Polish woman vividly recalls her World War II childhood in her Nazi-occupied homeland. Her family’s home in the town of Oswiecim was seized by German forces and they were relocated to a house only about a mile away from the camp.
A woman walks in a street in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland on the outskirts of which the Nazis built the Auschwitz death camp, Poland, on 27th January. PICTURE: Reuters/Nir Elias.
“When you went outside you saw the [smoke] column. It stank so badly, especially when the wind blew in this direction,” Szelc said, speaking to Reuters in the same home from which she had been removed as a child. “When the orchestra played and the people were screaming, the dogs were barking, it was like hell.”
WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES EXPRESSES ALARM OVER “DRAMATIC INCREASE” IN ANTI-SEMITISM
The World Council of Churches has expressed alarm over what it says is the “dramatic increase in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents that has been reported in many countries, and at the pernicious persistence of Holocaust denial, especially online”.
In a statement issued to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the WCC, and Dr Agnes Abuom, WCC moderator, said anti-Semitism “is often and in many places the first expression of rising intolerance and violence against minority communities, and that it must be resisted and rejected by all people of good will from all communities.”
“On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must all recognize that antisemitism as not an historical anomaly but a persistent and rising threat to Jews and to the openness and inclusiveness of societies around the world.”
The WCC called on member churches to “increase their solidarity and cooperation with Jewish communities and partners in their own contexts to address this threat, to confront the normalization of hatred against ‘the other’, and to engage in advocacy with their governments and authorities for the promotion and protection of human rights and dignity equally for all without discrimination.”
– DAVID ADAMS
The Nazis forced prisoner orchestras to play music at some of their death camps as the trains carrying Jews from across Europe arrived and the passengers were sent on to their death.
Szelc said the sights and sounds still reverberate in her mind today. “Such a tragedy,” she said, shaking her head.
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished in Auschwitz’s gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease.
Six million Jews in all were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust.
Szelc’s quiet hometown was filled with the commotion of car convoys and police sirens on Monday as world leaders gathered at the Auschwitz site for a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of its liberation near the end of World War Two.
Across the street from Szelc, her neighbour Barbara Kaczmarczyk, 55, said that after the German defeat, her grandparents returned to their home, in which she lives today, to discover a trove of Nazi documents and SS porcelain dishware.
“Every old house here has some,” said Kaczmarczyk. “There is a lot of history here.”
She was told by her family that Joseph Mengele, the SS doctor who subjected Auschwitz prisoners to cruel medical experiments, had at one point resided in their brown brick house. Reuters could not independently verify her account.
“No one wants to repeat this history. It is good that everybody remembers it,” Kaczmarczyk said.
The history of World War II has become a political and diplomatic issue for Poland whose nationalist government seeks to highlight Polish suffering in the conflict and rule out any complicity by Poles who aided the Nazis during the Holocaust.
