60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ -- (Senate - January 25, 2005)

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Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, the world pauses this week to observe the 60th anniversary of an event that calls for the deepest solemnity and reflection. In early 1945, as American and British armies closed in on the Third Reich from the west, Soviet forces were on the march through Poland. On January 27, they came to a place called Auschwitz.

In the Nazi death industry, Auschwitz was its most productive factory. It is estimated that some one and a half million were murdered there. The victims were Poles, Slavs, Russians, Gypsies, but the majority were Jews. They died from disease, starvation, exposure and exhaustion, on the gallows and in front of the firing squads, but mostly they were marched into the gas chambers. From the camp's establishment in 1940 until its liberation, the ovens of Auschwitz operated around the clock, their smokestacks spewing the stench of inhumanity across the countryside.

The Holocaust is a story of incomprehensible inhumanity, of an act of enormity that passed all moral bounds and entered the realm of pure evil. It also, however, is a story of incredible heroism, of men and women who risked their lives, many who sacrificed their lives, for others--not just family and friends, but often total strangers.

Some of these heroes are well known to us: Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schlindler, to name just two. Some are less known, but equally deserving of mankind's gratitude. The American journalist Varian Fry, the beneficiary of a privileged childhood and an Ivy League education, risked his life repeatedly spiriting 2,000 Jews out of occupied France through the network he created of black-market funds, forged documents and secret escape routes. In 1941, in retaliation for an escape by others, a group of Auschwitz prisoners was lined up before a firing squad. At the last moment, the Roman Catholic Priest Maximillian Kolbe voluntarily stepped forward to take a father's place.

The names of some heroes will never be known to us. In the weeks before the liberation, the Nazis began dismantling the machinery of death at Auschwitz in order to hide their crimes. The gas chambers and crematoria were dynamited, the mass graves were disguised, and the infamous March of Death began. Nearly 60,000 prisoners, already weakened by hunger and illness, were driven on foot across the harsh winter countryside to camps within the Reich. The penalty for failure to keep up was summary execution.

That also was the penalty for the people who offered food, water, and--whenever the opportunity arose--escape when this sorrowful parade passed through their villages. One survivor of the March of Death, Jan Wygas, tells of a villager who approached his column of prisoners with a bottle of water:

``Let them drink,'' she said in German to the SS guards. ``They are people, too.'' She gave the water to one of the prisoners. The SS man yelled at her to move back. As she turned to walk away, he shot her in the back of the head. I saw this with my own eyes.

And yet, despite this brutality heaped on top of brutality, the people of the villages continued to offer aid, in Poland, in Silesia, even in Germany itself.

Indeed, there are stories of those within the regime who resisted in whatever way they could. In his inspiring Holocaust memoir, ``Anton the Dove Fancier,'' Bernard Gotfryd tells of the time in 1944 when he was sent as a slave laborer to a German aircraft plant. Like his co-workers, Gotfryd did his best to be the worst worker possible, turning out defective parts and causing his machine to break down constantly. His stern German supervisor, known only as Herr Gruber, seemed not to notice this widespread incompetence, despite being under constant pressure to increase production.

Once, Gotfryd sprained his ankle so severely he could not walk and could barely stand. In most cases, this disability would have earned a prisoner a spot on a train to a death camp. Again, Herr Gruber seemed not to notice.

In the summer of 1944, Gotfryd discovered a treasure in the pocket of his work overalls: a sausage and a slab of real bread wrapped in newspaper. The rare and delicious food nourished his body. The newspaper nourished his soul, for it told of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The meaning of this message was to hold on, salvation was on the way. Gotfryd knew the messenger could only have been Herr Gruber.

From where does this courage, this compassion, this self-sacrifice for total strangers come? None of us can say with certainty, but we all are blessed by its presence.

On the other hand, the source of the hatred that led one of Europe's greatest powers to enact blatantly discriminatory laws, then to revel in a night of shattered windows, and finally to commit mass murder is known to us all too well. It is that particularly virulent and persistent form of mindless bigotry called anti-Semitism.

One would think that the stories of Holocaust survivors, the irrefutable evidence before our eyes for the last 60 years, the memorials at such places as Auschwitz, and the debt we owe 6 million victims would be more than enough to eradicate this scourge. Tragically, Mr. President, that is not the case.

Earlier this month, our State Department released a Report on Global Anti-Semitism. This report is the result of the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004, introduced by my distinguished colleague from Ohio, Senator VOINOVICH. I am proud to have been a co-sponsor.

To say that the findings of this report are discouraging is a gross understatement. In country after country around the world, there has been a sharp increase in both the frequency and severity of anti-Semitic incidents in the first years of the 21st Century. Clearly, the lessons of the first half of the 20th are in danger of being forgotten.

These incidents are not just the random vandalism of Jewish cemeteries or synagogues, or the occasional incident of harassment or assault, and the perpetrators are not just neo-Nazis or skinheads on the fringe of society. The new strain of this disease combines ancient anti-Jewish prejudice with a new demonization of the State of Israel and unbridled anti-Americanism, replete with Nazi comparisons and symbolism. In this new anti-Semitism, the extreme right and the extreme left have gone around the bend so far that they now have joined forces.

We see evidence of this new anti-Semitism all around us. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is cited with increasing frequency in the Middle East press, instead of being consigned, along with its ideological sequel, Mein Kampf, to the ash heap of literary history. In some areas of Europe, the swastika replaces the letter ``s'' in anti-Israel and anti-American posters, bumper stickers and buttons. There is the absurd rumor that Jews in New York City had advance warning of the September 11 attacks. The Holocaust itself, when not being denied, is at least being diminished.

The answer is not to silence these despicable ideas but to respond to them. We all have an obligation to history and to humanity to speak out, loudly and without exception, to this perversion of the truth and this degradation of civilization.

Julia Skalina is an Auschwitz survivor, a native of Czechoslovakia who now lives in my home State, in the city of Portland. She is a frequent speaker at schools in Maine. These are her words: ``I learned what hatred can do, what people driven by hatred can do. I wish any future generation should never have to live through what we lived through.''

That wish will come true only if we--all of us--make it so. The horror of the Holocaust and the magnificence of the human spirit that it revealed demand this of us.

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