Societies have failed to learn from the Holocaust and prevent the repetition of such crimes, Auschwitz survivor Ruth Cohen warned today during a commemoration event at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“I am so disheartened and sadly convinced that we have not learned the lessons that this history — my history — teaches,” Cohen told U.S. and European officials, Holocaust survivors, and national Jewish organizations assembled for the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration.
Cohen, 88, was sent to Auschwitz after Nazi German forces marched into Hungary in 1944. She recalled learning shortly after her arrival at the notorious camp that “our mother, brother, and little cousins who had come with us had already been murdered” before emphasizing that such horrors are underway today.
“As I look around our world, I see groups like the Yazidi, the Rohingya, and Uighurs, being persecuted and subject to incarceration, violence, and even genocide,” Cohen said.
That was a reference to three campaigns of brutality that have taken place just in the last five years. The Yazidis, an ethnic and religious minority in Iraq, were targeted by the Islamic State through mass sex slavery and murder that the United Nations deemed a genocide in 2016. Thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have been killed by government security forces intent on “ethnic cleansing,” according to the U.N. And Chinese communist officials in Xinjiang have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims in re-education camps, an industrial-scale crackdown unseen “since the 1930s,” according to State Department officials.
Cohen’s remarks contained a rebuke for U.S. and European audiences as well. “I am scared at the alarming rise in anti-Semitism, in violent and deadly attacks on Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere,” she said. “It is appalling to see the stunning denial of the Holocaust, and how the experience of the survivors and the victims are being distorted in the very places where it happened.”
That was an implicit reference to the so-called “memory wars” still underway in Eastern Europe, where the history of the Holocaust remains a fraught and even geopolitically contentious topic. The Soviet Union’s role in the military defeat of the Nazis is complicated by the willingness of Soviet citizens to help Nazis persecute Jews in the war between the two totalitarian regimes. Soviet authorities “imposed a policy of silence and denial” after the war, according to the Kennan Institute’s Izabella Tavorovsky, while contemporary Russian leaders denounce critics of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe as neo-Nazis.
Cohen’s reflections revealed the personal tragedy that those political disputes can obscure. Her “happy childhood” in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia, was marred overnight by the 1938 partition that subjected her to Hungarian rule. “My father’s business was taken away immediately, and our nanny had to leave because she was no longer allowed to work for a Jewish family,” she said. “Shortly after, we learned that members of my mother’s family had been taken to Majdanek and murdered. My family officially went into mourning.”
She soon witnessed murders herself, beginning with the public execution of a “biology teacher, whom I admired and adored,” who refused to board the cattle cars that took her Jewish community to Auschwitz. In the months that followed, Cohen and her sister occasionally received messages telling them “to be at a specific place where we might see our father,” who also worked in the camp. They also managed to meet their uncle and talk across the barbed wire fence that divided them.
“He informed us that soon he will be taken to the gas chambers,” she said, before her voice broke with emotion. “Indeed, in a few days, a friend of his came to our meeting spot and told us — sorry — that uncle had been killed. There are no words to adequately describe the horror of that moment.”
The girls were transferred, first to Nuremberg and then to the Czech town of Holysov to work in Siemens factories. The Holysov factory was overrun by White Russian partisans “two days before the end of the war,” armed with bayonets.
“Most of the Germans did not resist arrest by the partisans, but one officer tried to flee on his motorbike,” Cohen said. “He was shot in front of us. Some cheered, but most of us were shocked to see such cruelty. Our humanity was still intact.”
The White Russian partisans soon made clear that the Jewish captives “were not welcome” among them, so the group remained in Holysov to await the U.S. Army.
“The Holocaust teaches us about human nature — that there is great capacity for good, as well as for evil,” Cohen said. “I implore everyone, especially those in leadership positions, to be motivated by this history. Use your authority and influence to push back against those who perpetrate the worst instincts in human behavior. Do what you can to ensure that our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren do not face the same atrocities.”
