Today is Monday, January 27, 2025. Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp complex. Unfortunately, as time passes and these events fade into the shadows as the few remaining survivors of the horror die off, the state of the world continues to suffer from a growing tide of antisemitism. An online CNN article by Sophie Tanno, Lauren Kent, and Billy Stockwell marks the event entitled ‘Nothing will be easy about returning:’ Survivors mark 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation.”

One of those survivors, Jona Laks, 94, talks about how necessary it is to return to the proverbial scene of the crime. She remarks, “It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything. But it’s necessary. It’s necessary for the world to know.”

Laks spent more than a year at Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp when she was only about 12 years old. She and her twin sister, Miriam, experienced horrors in the inhumane medical experiments of infamous SS physician Josef Mengele. Laks was initially lined up to be murdered in the gas chambers, but her older sister saved her by shouting that the twins should not be separated.

Laks bemoans the number of survivors who are not around to speak out about the atrocities of Nazi Germany. She said, “As time passes over, things are being forgotten. The world hasn’t learned its lessons from what happened, from what was done.”

Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at the concentration camp from 1940 to 1945, many of them Jews but also other victims of the Third Reich, including Poles, the Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Michael Bornstein, who survived for seven months inside Auschwitz as a child, said that “nothing will be easy about returning” to the site, which is now a museum.

Streams of mourners young and old laid down candles at the former concentration camp site to mark today’s anniversary. Some bowed their heads or took a knee in front of a line of wreaths.

World leaders also gathered in Poland to mark the camp’s liberation, including Britain’s King Charles (new president Donald J. Chump was noticeably absent), German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron. None spoke at the event, which instead aimed to focus on the voices of survivors.

One of the symbols of the 80th anniversary is a freight train car, which was placed directly in front of the main gate. The train car is dedicated to the memory of the approximately 420,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz.

The United Nations declared January 27 as the International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2005. Observed annually, it honors the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and remembers the six million Jews who lost their lives under the Nazis.

The museum says the event at the former concentration site offers the chance for shared commemoration and global reflection.

It comes at a time of mounting antisemitism in Europe, fueled by conflict in the Middle East which saw Israel launch a war on Gaza in response to terror attacks carried out by Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023.

There has been an increase in antisemitic incidents in Europe since October 2023, with some Jewish community organizations reporting an increase of more than 400 percent, according to a survey from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), published in June.

FRA Director Sirpa Rautio said, “Europe is witnessing a wave of antisemitism, partly driven by the conflict in the Middle East. This severely limits Jewish people’s ability to live in safety and with dignity.”

Of those surveyed by the FRA, 76 percent say they hide their Jewish identity at least occasionally and 34 percent avoid Jewish events or sites due to feeling unsafe. What a sad way to live in 2025.

A 99-year-old survivor of Auschwitz from Lodz, Poland, Leon Weintraub, decried the rising hatred in Europe and elsewhere which he blames on “increasingly vocal movements of the radical and anti-democratic right.” He said he also sees that in Sweden, where he settled after fleeing postwar antisemitism in Poland.

Describing the features of this hatred, Weintraub said, “This ideology, an attitude that preaches hostility and hatred towards others, defines racism, antisemitism, and homophobia as virtues.”

For the first time, Germany itself was represented by both Chancellor Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. It was a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation’s crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia’s brutal invasion, was among those in attendance, along with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda.

Another survivor who spoke at this somber event was 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was brought to the camp aged 5 with her mother and was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated. She recalled arriving after a long ride in a dark cattle car. She remembered she was hot, hungry, thirsty, and very terrified and still recalls the cries of desperate women around her. When she arrived at the concentration camp, the sky was obscured by dark smoke and stench from the burning bodies.

After the war, Friedman settled in the United States where she became a therapist and raised a family. She fears that rising antisemitism is also destroying the safe haven that this country represented for Jews in the postwar era.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Friedman sadly noted, “The world has become toxic. I realize that we’re in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”

Thus on the eve of this solemn anniversary, let us be ever so vigilant to try to stem this tide of rising antisemitism that is ever increasing in places around the world, even here in the United States with the abominable increase in far-right groups spouting hated of Jews in their manifestos. However, don’t expect the new president to do anything about these groups in the four years he is in power. Another thing to blame Chump for if he ever ends his term.

And so it went!