- 1 year ago
Some 50 former inmates of the largest of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau have made the trip to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation. How to process the collective folly of the industrial-scale mass extermination of 1 million Jews, along with 100,000 others, in the space of a few short years? The Holocaust shattered the belief that technology could only be synonymous with progress and on that score, the gas chambers serve as a cautionary tale.
How do citizens and nations remember the Holocaust in 2025? From the former Soviets whose forefathers liberated the camps, to nations at the other end of the globe untouched by World War II, what's the lesson?The words "never again" ring hollow in today's world. An all-too-long list of genocides have unfolded since. How, then, to talk about it?Produced by François Picard, Théophile Vareille, Elisa Amiri, Ilayda Habip.
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How do citizens and nations remember the Holocaust in 2025? From the former Soviets whose forefathers liberated the camps, to nations at the other end of the globe untouched by World War II, what's the lesson?The words "never again" ring hollow in today's world. An all-too-long list of genocides have unfolded since. How, then, to talk about it?Produced by François Picard, Théophile Vareille, Elisa Amiri, Ilayda Habip.
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
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NewsTranscript
00:00What can we learn from the last survivors about then and about now?
00:06Some 50 former inmates of the largest of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau making
00:11the trip to Poland for the 80th anniversary.
00:15How to process the collective folly of the industrial scale mass extermination of one
00:20million Jews along with 100,000 others in the space of a few short years.
00:26The Holocaust, shattering the belief that technology could only be synonymous with progress.
00:32And on that score, the gas chambers serve as a cautionary tale.
00:35How do citizens and nations remember when we're living in 2025?
00:41From the former Soviets whose forefathers liberated the camps to nations at the other
00:45end of the globe untouched by World War II, what's the lesson?
00:49The words never again ring hollow in today's world.
00:53An all too long list of genocides have since unfolded.
00:56How then to talk about it?
00:58Today in the France 24 debate, lessons from the last survivors.
01:02With us, France 24's Claire Pacalin, who interviewed such said survivors in preparations for these
01:10commemorations.
01:11We'll be hearing clips from them in a moment.
01:12Thanks for being with us.
01:13You're welcome.
01:14Also with us, attorney Rachelle Fleur-Pardot, grandchild of Auschwitz survivors.
01:19Welcome back to the show.
01:20Hello.
01:22Rachelle Fleur-Pardot is a member of the Remembrance Commission of the French Jewish
01:26Umbrella Group, the CRIF, author of The Doctors of Auschwitz.
01:30Thanks for joining us.
01:32And from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies
01:37at Brown University.
01:39Welcome to the show.
01:40Thank you for having me.
01:42You can always listen, like, and subscribe to the France 24 debate wherever podcasts
01:48are streamed.
01:51King Charles, Chancellor Olaf Schultz of Germany, the president of Poland, many more
01:56world leaders on hand, none speaking, though, at the ceremony.
02:01Instead, the mic opened to survivors, like 86-year-old Polish-born American Tova Friedman.
02:09Since I was a little girl, I thought of it as my birthday.
02:16This is my birthday, January 27th.
02:22I celebrate it every single year.
02:26In fact, today I got all kinds of emails.
02:29Some of my friends don't even know that I have a regular birthday because this is what
02:38counts.
02:40An interesting take, Claire Pacala.
02:42Sort of for her, a rebirth on January the 27th.
02:45Certainly.
02:46She was only a little girl.
02:47She was five years old when she was deported.
02:50There is a famous photograph of a group of children in Auschwitz showing their forearms,
02:55showing their tattoos to the photographer, and she's in that photo.
02:59I had the opportunity of meeting Juliette Kononka, who's one of the last French Auschwitz
03:04survivors who's still alive today.
03:06She showed me her tattoo of her prisoner number on her arm.
03:10She said it was a bit awkward showing it because it's not really decoration, but she showed
03:15it to me.
03:16It is remarkable today seeing people who are still alive, who have a prisoner number tattooed
03:23onto their arm.
03:24I think that's really something quite poignant.
03:26We can listen to Juliette Kononka speaking to me in Paris with Stéphanie Trouillard
03:30a couple of months ago.
03:34It's a bit embarrassing to show this as decoration when it has killed so many people.
03:45When we arrived, the train stopped, we saw chimneys emitting a special kind of smoke,
03:55and now when the orders arrive, you have to undress.
04:00For me, when people ask me what's the worst, that's when I had to undress.
04:10So, Jeannette, when she spoke about the chimneys spewing out this strange kind of smoke, well
04:17she arrived in Auschwitz after three days of a horrible journey on a train.
04:21She was separated from her father and her 12-year-old brother.
04:25She was put with the women, she was selected for forced labour.
04:28She was tattooed, shaved all over her body.
04:30When she said she was made to be naked, that was the first thing she was told to do.
04:33That was the worst experience for her because it was so humiliating.
04:36It was the dehumanisation process had begun.
04:39Later on in the day, she found out from prisoners who had been there longer,
04:43who knew how everything worked, she asked me,
04:45when am I going to see my family again?
04:47You're not going to see your family again.
04:49Can you see the smoke over there?
04:51That's your family.
04:52And that was her father and her little brother.
04:54Gosh, what a story.
04:57And she wasn't the only survivor.
04:59You see her pluck when she describes it.
05:03She uses sort of gallows humour there.
05:05Certainly, she's nearly 100 years old.
05:07She's remarkable.
05:08She's got a lot of energy.
05:09And I had also the opportunity to meet Arlette Testier.
05:12She lost her father.
05:14He was deported to Auschwitz.
05:15He never came home.
05:16Deported because he was Jewish.
05:18And she is what is known in France as a hidden child.
05:21So she was an enfant caché.
05:23She lived in hiding with kind souls who took her in during the war,
05:27during Nazi's occupation of France.
05:29And she showed us a gift that her father had sent her.
05:32So he was first arrested and sent to Pithiviers,
05:35which was a camp in France, not too far from Orleans,
05:38where many of the prisoners were kept before they were put on trains to Auschwitz.
05:43And he sent her a pen holder from Pithiviers.
05:46And she showed us the pen holder.
05:47And I think we can take a listen to her now showing us this pen holder
05:50and telling us why it's so important to her.
06:20A lot to unpack there.
06:37Because a reminder that not only were Jews rounded up and deported,
06:43but their apartments confiscated.
06:47Certainly.
06:48I also worked on a report recently about these bienspouliers,
06:51the word in French.
06:52So it's looted cultural property.
06:54Often paintings, but not only.
06:56And those who survived the Holocaust coming back to their apartments
07:00and finding them empty.
07:01Finding other people living in them.
07:03Finding the door locked.
07:04And even today there are, well, the Monuments Men,
07:07who you may remember the George Clooney film that came out some years ago,
07:11an allied unit which was tasked with finding these works of art.
07:14A lot of them were paintings in Germany and bringing them back
07:17and giving them back to their rightful owners.
07:20They found thousands and thousands of artworks.
07:22But some were never given back.
07:24It was hard to trace the families.
07:26Many had died.
07:27They'd been dispersed.
07:28And still today in France there are a little over 2,000 artworks.
07:32They're being stored in museums or on display in museums.
07:36And museums are still today trying to work out who the legal heirs are.
07:40There's one at the Louvre, two actually at the Louvre,
07:43two still lives of a Flemish painter.
07:45And the Louvre just managed to find out that there are 48 legal heirs
07:50to those two paintings that were stolen from Mathilde Javal,
07:54a Jewish woman living in Paris.
07:56Now she survived the Holocaust.
07:57She tried to get her paintings back.
07:59The link was never made.
08:00And 80 years later her rightful heirs have got the painting.
08:05They donated it back to the Louvre.
08:07But, yes, certainly a big, big, big issue was for those who survived
08:11the Holocaust coming back to nothing.
08:14Let me turn to you, Rachelle Flor-Pardot.
08:16What does this 80th anniversary mean,
08:21listening to those tales that we heard there?
08:24I think this 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp
08:29may be the most important anniversary yet because it may be the last one
08:33where survivors attend.
08:36The next anniversary, maybe the 19th,
08:38maybe there will be no more Auschwitz survivors to attend and to speak
08:41and to testify about their story.
08:44And I was actually really moved to hear you tell the story of Jeannette Kolinka,
08:49and I was really moved also because I had the chance to meet her today
08:52at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
08:54I'm really moved because, as a matter of fact,
08:57Jeannette Kolinka was in the same convoy as my grandmother
09:02and my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather.
09:05These convoys were these train convoys that left first to a triage station
09:11north of Paris oftentimes.
09:13Yes, Drancy.
09:14And then on to the camps.
09:15Yeah, and then on to Auschwitz.
09:17And it is a convoy number 71, and it left Drancy in April 1944.
09:26And there was Jeannette Kolinka in this convoy,
09:29and there was also my grandmother, as I said.
09:32And my grandmother died when I was five.
09:35And like many other survivors, like Jeannette Kolinka herself,
09:39she didn't speak in her younger years.
09:41When she came back from the camps, she did not speak about what happened.
09:45Actually, she even told some of her friends never to ask her questions
09:49about what happened there.
09:51And so as a granddaughter of a survivor, I often ask myself,
09:57what happened to her?
09:58How did she survive?
10:00And I live with the frustration not to be able to have her whole story
10:04because she died too young to speak about it.
10:07And I find information about what happened to my grandmother
10:11through Jeannette Kolinka's testimony, through what she says,
10:15because basically when she described, as you said, the moment when she got
10:19off the train and how she was separated from her father,
10:23actually the same thing happened to my grandmother
10:25because her father was killed the moment he arrived in Auschwitz.
10:29And my grandmother and my great-grandmother, Rachel,
10:32managed to survive.
10:34And why am I here today?
10:36Why is this so important?
10:38It is because as we have less and less survivors and also as at the same
10:42times we see anti-Semitism rise all across the world and in Europe as well,
10:48it is, I guess, our duty, us, the younger generations,
10:52to share their voice, to share their story, and to assure that this
10:57will not be forgotten so that it never happens again.
11:01Bruno Halouya, this 80th commemoration, you agree,
11:06it's perhaps the most important?
11:09Does it always seem like the most important?
11:11Yes, it's probably the most important because probably,
11:15and it's very short, it's the last survivor,
11:18the last time that the survivor, we are going to see survivors,
11:22Holocaust survivors.
11:24It's very important for me, for my generation of second generation.
11:29My mother was in Paris during the war.
11:32She was an Aden child.
11:34The father of my mother was killed in Auschwitz.
11:38I was born in a family when there is no family.
11:43The particularities of Jewish in France is that they live before the war,
11:50during the war, and after the war, in the same place.
11:54It's not like Holocaust survivors from the US.
11:58They come from Poland to the US or from some who go to Israel.
12:02Now, and they see people after the war who denounce them.
12:09The same policemen, the same people who keep their apartment.
12:16It's a paradox. It's a French paradox.
12:19During a long time, Jewish from France don't want to speak about this period.
12:25As Rachel Parlow said, for my generation, Holocaust survivors were victims.
12:33For their generation, Holocaust survivors were heroes.
12:37It's a great difference.
12:39Omar Bartov, you're hearing that generational difference here in the studio.
12:46How you talk about this has changed over the years.
12:51Yes, it certainly has.
12:53It is true that certainly in France in the early decades,
12:58one did not speak of victims, of Jewish victims.
13:03There was no distinction being made.
13:05But I would say, you know, one important element,
13:09since we are in a French context,
13:11is that it should be stressed that many of the Jews who were deported from France
13:17were deported to such camps as Drancy or Pitié or taken to Verdive.
13:22They were taken by the French police.
13:25And they were then handed over to the Germans.
13:28So part of the story of the Holocaust is really that it's a European story.
13:34It was a European undertaking carried out by the Nazi regime
13:40with multiple collaborators, collaborating regimes, organizations throughout Europe.
13:49And for me, this is of particular importance
13:52because my own mother came from a small town that is now in Ukraine
13:56and at the time was in Poland called Buczacz.
14:00And she left with her parents in 1935 when she was 11.
14:06So she came to Palestine and that's the reason that I was born in Israel.
14:10But the entire rest of my family, and these were all extended families, was murdered there.
14:16And what's important in this story is that although the Germans came to that town
14:20and carried out the genocide on a very local level,
14:24that it's not the story of deportations to Auschwitz.
14:28Half of the people were killed on the spot.
14:31It was a local population that participated and facilitated that killing.
14:38So again, the story of the Holocaust is a complex one
14:41because it involved so many people who were not part of the organizers of genocide
14:48or even of the country that was carrying it out,
14:51but did so for other reasons, not least, as was said before,
14:56for reasons of property, of simply taking over people's homes.
15:00Let me ask you, when you saw the pan at one point during the ceremony of all the leaders,
15:07it's a reminder following up on what you just said
15:10about how different countries deal with it differently.
15:13In the case of Germany, we had the president of Germany, the chancellor.
15:17In 2025, there's no doubt, it's a feeling of penitence almost, what we see on their part.
15:24If you go to major cities in Germany, they have plaques and reminders everywhere.
15:29For others, it's more ambiguous.
15:32Well, first of all, you want to notice that who was there, but also who was not there.
15:39So Vladimir Putin was not there.
15:42And we have to remember, Auschwitz, for instance, was liberated by the Red Army.
15:47Putin was not there because he is now undertaking a criminal war against Ukraine.
15:55Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the prime minister of Israel,
15:59a state that was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust
16:04and found its legitimacy internationally in large part because of the Holocaust,
16:09was not there because there's an arrest warrant against him by the International Criminal Court.
16:16So, yes, things have changed a great deal.
16:20And one has to remember that although Germany has taken a whole decade of penitence over the Holocaust,
16:29Germany now sees the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland, of the AfD,
16:35which is maybe one of the largest parties in Germany in the coming elections,
16:41in the most powerful country of Europe, which is a party that will not speak about that past.
16:49It says that past is behind us and we have to create now a Germany für Germans.
16:55And cheerleaded by Donald Trump's ally, Elon Musk.
17:03Let me just ask you, because the Poles, the Polish president had said that if Benjamin Netanyahu had wanted to come,
17:10they would not have honored the ICC arrest warrant request.
17:14Was it a good thing that Netanyahu stayed away?
17:18Well, first of all, I don't think it was a good thing that the Polish president said that,
17:22but he probably didn't have a choice within the context.
17:25It's a very good thing that Netanyahu did not come because if the lesson of the Holocaust is that one should not carry out crimes
17:36against humanity, war crimes and genocide,
17:40then a head of state who is under the shadow of being accused of carrying out such crimes
17:45should certainly not represent the state of Israel.
17:48And there can be, and there is, I believe, another representative of that state,
17:52which should be represented, but not by someone who is under this kind of shadow of indictment.
17:57Let's go back to that point about how this collective folly, as we described it at the outset,
18:04it wasn't the work of one nationality.
18:07And you kind of also had that impression when you saw some of the survivors when they came back.
18:13Jean-Michel Flore-Pardot was talking about how there was this silence at first,
18:17and that silence loomed large in 1945 when the camps were liberated.
18:23Certainly, Jeanette Kolenko, who was in the same convoy as your family members,
18:27she didn't speak at all about her experience until the mid-90s.
18:31She worked in the market north of Paris.
18:34Of course, her prisoner number was visible, but some people may comment on it, others wouldn't.
18:40She did not speak about it.
18:41She married, she had a child, she lived her life.
18:44And it was only in the mid-90s after Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List came out,
18:49and then there was a foundation created, and she was asked to give testimony.
18:54She didn't want to at first.
18:56They were a bit insistent, and she finally did.
18:58And since then, she has been going into schools, going into universities,
19:02speaking to young people tirelessly, trying to say to them, and she says,
19:05My story isn't important.
19:07What's important is that you understand what hatred can cause, what it can provoke,
19:12how hateful man can become.
19:15You must, must, must understand that.
19:18And certainly, her return to Paris, she did talk about her return to Paris.
19:22She went through the Hotel Lutetia, so it was a luxury hotel,
19:26which the French state chose as a kind of welcome center for those returning from the camps.
19:33Very few Jewish people returned.
19:35Most of the people who passed through the Lutetia were members of the resistance
19:39or political prisoners, and it was a pretty brutal return.
19:43They were sprayed with DDT pesticide.
19:46They were covered in lice and disease.
19:48Still, spraying them with pesticide was really quite something
19:51and probably not a very good idea.
19:52They were questioned, and there was fear that there were collaborators among them.
19:55And finally, they were given some medical care.
19:57But it wasn't a soft landing when those who managed to survive came back to France.
20:02And you spoke about it with another survivor who, they were not all Jewish.
20:10At Auschwitz, one million Jews died, but there were 100,000 others.
20:14Certainly, and there were other camps as well.
20:16And in January, Auschwitz was liberated,
20:19but it took a few more months for other camps to be liberated.
20:22I spoke to Jacqueline Fleury, 101 years old she is now,
20:26and she was at the Ravensbruck camp.
20:28She was part of the resistance.
20:30She was deported with her mother.
20:32And she told me a bit, Jacqueline Fleury,
20:35she told me a bit about what it was like coming back to France
20:38and her actual stay at the Lutetia with her mother.
20:41I think we can take a listen to that extract now.
20:45They gave us a bedroom with two beds.
20:50But we took the mattress off the beds
20:53because we were used to sleeping on the floor.
20:57Well, certainly that's an idea of what it was like.
21:00She was emaciated.
21:02She was extremely thin.
21:03She was extremely tired.
21:05And she also explained to us that when she got to the Lutetia,
21:08she was with her mother and she was with another woman,
21:10another young woman who she had become very close to
21:13during the whole dreadful period of deportation.
21:16And they were separated at the Lutetia
21:18because the other girl had family waiting for her.
21:21She said it was such a painful separation.
21:24And then for years and years and years,
21:26of course, no one talked about it in France.
21:28It was a taboo subject for a very long time.
21:31A taboo subject for decades.
21:34Bruno Halouya, there was under Jacques Chirac in the 1990s
21:39that the French state officially recognised
21:43what Omar Bartov was talking about earlier,
21:45that police, that first police roundup
21:48that took place in the summer of 1941.
21:51Yes, it's a great gesture of Jacques Chirac.
21:56For us, it's the most important action of Jacques Chirac.
22:01Imagine that during a lot of years,
22:05nobody wants to accuse French police
22:10and nobody wants to accuse the responsibility
22:14of the French government of Vichy.
22:18Don't forget that Francois Mitterrand,
22:22who was president of Republic...
22:25And who'd been in the resistance.
22:27Yes, was friend, was a very good friend of a man,
22:33René Bousquet, who was the organiser of the Rafle du Veldive,
22:40where 4,000 children were killed.
22:46It's terrible.
22:48You know, it's a lot of people
22:52that have bad action during the war.
22:55After the war, they continue to live,
22:58they continue to work, they continue to...
23:01They have no problem.
23:03And with Jacques Chirac, it's a very clever discourse
23:09which changes with a lot of consequences.
23:14French have a responsibility
23:17for the deportation of Jewish in France.
23:21Rachel Flor-Pardo, political fortunes can change.
23:24Is that going to stay?
23:27There's no going back for that recognition
23:30of the French state's responsibility?
23:32No, I think there is no going back.
23:34Actually, as a matter of fact, my family was living in Marseille
23:37and they were arrested also by the French police.
23:40And I think this recognition of the responsibility
23:43of France in all this had been of huge importance
23:47when Jacques Chirac finally, eventually did it.
23:50And now we have to look forward.
23:53How do we here in France and in other places around the world,
23:58how do we ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is kept alive?
24:04How do we ensure that we do not forget what happened?
24:07How do we ensure that the fact that there will soon be no more survivors
24:11does not give much more space for the negationists
24:15to spread their fake news all over the Internet.
24:19We have to be really careful here.
24:22And we all here have a duty.
24:24We all here have had the chance to witness Holocaust survivors' testimonies
24:29about what happened to them while they were in deportation camps.
24:33And we have here to spread their words to our kids,
24:38to our younger generations coming up so that they can tell their kids later on
24:42and so that this part of their history is never forgotten or changed
24:46or minimized as many want to transform it.
24:50Omer Bartov, tell us your experience in the classroom.
24:56Are younger generations more prone to disinformation?
25:03You know, I mean, I taught for quite a while various courses on the Holocaust.
25:08I also teach a large class on modern genocide,
25:14so genocide throughout the 20th century.
25:17What I find is, yes, there is a bit of a decline in enrollment in classes
25:23that deal directly with the Holocaust.
25:27There is an interest, I think, in this phenomenon of crimes against humanity and genocide.
25:34And I just want to say that I think, as you mentioned at the beginning,
25:39when everyone said at the end of the war, never again,
25:43people often did not specify what they meant by never again.
25:47I think many young people today think about that.
25:51Never again what?
25:53Because the Holocaust, horrible as it was, and much as we must remember it
25:58and commemorate it and not allow its denial, the Holocaust itself was over.
26:05But there have been so many genocides since.
26:08And the lesson, I think, that we should draw,
26:11and I think many young people, to their credit, draw,
26:15is that we should never allow these kinds of crimes to happen again
26:20against Jews or against other minorities.
26:22And we live in a world now where so many different minorities,
26:27immigrants, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, are being persecuted.
26:32And we cannot allow for that to happen or for our commemoration of the Holocaust
26:38to serve as the only, as a kind of way out for us,
26:43not to look at what our own societies are doing and to focus only on the past
26:48and allow the present to, I would say, go by now, as we see,
26:54with the rise of so many populist movements,
26:57so much racism rising in Europe and in the United States,
27:01not to allow that again in the name of honoring what had happened in World War II.
27:07Yeah, and that brings us back to a point you made earlier.
27:09Among those on hand at Auschwitz, well, the Jewish president of Ukraine,
27:13Volodymyr Zelensky, who's been repeatedly called by Vladimir Putin
27:18the leader of a Ukraino-Nazi regime.
27:22Zelensky, who Sunday attended a commemoration at Kiev's Baben Yar Memorial
27:27where more than 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were killed in September 1941.
27:35And speaking of Vladimir Putin, not invited to Monday's service in Poland,
27:39instead laying a wreath in his hometown of St. Petersburg
27:43to mark the 81st anniversary of the city's liberation by the Nazis.
27:49So, dueling memories, Omer Bartov?
27:54Yes, of course there are dueling memories.
27:57In the case of Ukraine and Russia, definitely dueling memories.
28:01One has to remember that Putin tried to justify his attack on Ukraine
28:05by saying that there was a genocide of Russians, of ethnic Russians
28:09happening in Ukraine, so as to justify this illegal attack.
28:13There are dueling memories, and there always were.
28:16As you say also, as we just heard about France,
28:20there were for a long time this whole story,
28:24the somber years of France were covered up,
28:29and the French government would not take responsibility for the crimes of Vichy.
28:34It is true, the dueling memories.
28:37But what I would say is that for us, it's very important to look also reality in the face,
28:43and not to allow those who manipulate memory
28:47in the name of remembering the past to get away with current crimes.
28:53And that we certainly see happening with Russia.
28:58I would say, unfortunately, being from Israel and writing about Israel,
29:03there has been also a great deal of manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust
29:08by an Israeli government that has been involved in an extraordinary amount of killing in Gaza as we speak.
29:17Rachel Flor-Pardot, I was speaking with a member of Ibuka,
29:22the memory organization for Rwanda, saying it begins with dehumanization.
29:27Yeah, it begins with dehumanization,
29:30but I think we must say that there has been a lot of instrumentalization
29:35of different people calling Jews Nazis recently.
29:42And especially here in France, we have seen the far-left movements calling Jews Nazis.
29:48And we have seen many people around the world calling Jews Nazis.
29:52And I think this is a terrible inversion of history and responsibilities here,
29:57and I just wanted to mention it.
29:59And, of course, every story of survivors speaks about how dehumanization is what happens first.
30:10How, when they arrived in concentration camps, they were first dehumanized.
30:14How did it take place?
30:16It was the number that were tattooed on their arms.
30:19But didn't it start years earlier?
30:21Yeah, it started years earlier with how Jews were basically separated from the rest of the population.
30:28How Jews were marked as being only Jews, and that was all that was resting of their identity.
30:37And this began with what?
30:39It began with hate, with the hatred of the other, with anti-Semitism.
30:44And this is why we hear so many survivors, including Jeanette Kolinka, saying all the time,
30:51what she wants us to remember is that it is the hate of others that made Auschwitz possible.
30:59It is the fact that we do not accept difference.
31:02And this is also why she says, and why many other survivors say,
31:06that tolerance is so important if we want to avoid having it happen again.
31:13What's spectacular for us sitting here in Paris, Bruno Alouyat, is of course this happened on European soil.
31:21And there have been other genocides even in Europe since.
31:26Think of what happened during the war in Bosnia, for instance.
31:29But it's not on the same scale.
31:31And also this particularity, you're a medical doctor.
31:34The fact that this was technology and science put at the service of mass murder.
31:46Can we imagine that the number of Nobel Prizes in Germany was superior
31:55if we made the addition of the Nobel Prize in France, in Great Britain, in the US, before the war?
32:03Germany was the most important, the most intellectual country of the West World.
32:11And in Auschwitz, the particularity of Auschwitz, for me as a doctor, a medical doctor,
32:20it's the most black page of the history of medicine.
32:25Why? Because in Auschwitz, the SS who made the selection, when people arrived, was a doctor.
32:35And it was doctors from the most important universities of Germany.
32:44They have children, they love music, and every day they were the most important serial killers of the humanities.
32:54Can you imagine that on June 6, 1944, there were more people killed in Auschwitz
33:06than the summation of soldiers, US soldiers, British soldiers, German soldiers, Canadian soldiers.
33:15Killed on the beaches of Normandy.
33:17Yes. Every day you have between 4,000, 6,000, 7,000.
33:23How do you explain this, that these learned men, they were mostly men, would put their science to this end, at the service of this?
33:35There is an impregnation of a spirit, of a Heidi, that some people have life that is not important.
33:46But it's terrible because can we imagine that in the moment, Joseph Mengele has a pregnant woman.
33:59She has a boy who was born in 1944.
34:03And he has a boy in the same age that he sees many boys every day that he tells them to go in this direction to the gas chamber.
34:15It's terrible to imagine that men, with a good spirit at first, make medical experiments.
34:23And you imagine that in November, in October 1944, Paris was liberated.
34:31The Russians were about 100 kilometers and they continued to kill Jewish.
34:39It's terrible.
34:41And the men, you know, in Auschwitz there is only seven medical doctor SS.
34:48But they have the responsibility of the system of extermination.
34:57And it's very important to insist that the fact that it was people who were very educated, they liked music,
35:07and they had no problem to kill thousands of people every day.
35:13Omer Bartov, we're not going to go because unfortunately it's television and the time is short.
35:19And to all the reasons for what happened during World War II, the trauma of World War I,
35:26the mechanization of agriculture, the advent of mass media like the radio.
35:31But it was a period of upheaval.
35:34When do you look out for the signs of upheaval returning and fostering this kind of spirit,
35:41as you heard there Dr. Halouya describe it?
35:45Well, I think that there are two important elements here.
35:49And both were mentioned by other speakers.
35:53One is dehumanization.
35:56When you start speaking about certain categories of people as less than human,
36:02as they said in Rwanda, the Tutsi were cockroaches.
36:06As they said about the Jews, they were vermin, ungeziefer.
36:09When you start speaking about people as not being part of your circle of human solidarity,
36:14then that's the first phase toward genocide.
36:17The second thing I would say, of course, yes, at the end of World War I,
36:22Europe has been, saw a huge amount of destruction.
36:26One thing that came up was the notion that there was life unworthy of life,
36:31that there were some people who did not deserve to live.
36:35At the time, it was first of all the disabled.
36:39And the disabled were a burden on society.
36:43And the same people who started the killing of the disabled under the Nazi regime,
36:48they moved over to start the killing of Jews, of Roma, and of other people.
36:54That notion is crucial because the people were saying that, as was said before,
36:59they were scientists, they were people who were greatly honored.
37:02The two professions that create the modern societies that we know,
37:07the legal profession and the medical profession, the scientists,
37:11they were those who sanctioned genocide.
37:13And I think the one lesson we must draw is that we must always be careful
37:18when we are told that something is legal or illegal,
37:21or something is dictated by science or not.
37:24We have to always search our own conscience and see, is this indeed the case,
37:29or are we being led by people who tell us that they're the authority toward crimes?
37:35So, fast forward to 2025, where does the danger lie,
37:41not just for one category, not just for Jews, but for all of humanity?
37:47Look, I mean, I think right now we are seeing so many crises
37:51that are the result of a variety of factors, of instability in the world
37:57because of a climate crisis that is unaddressed
38:00and that will create more and more violence, migration of people.
38:04We're seeing also a disenchantment with the democratic liberal order
38:08and the rise of political forces that are based on forgetting
38:14everything that had happened in World War II
38:17and disrupting the international order that was put into place as a consequence of that.
38:23And there are not enough voices around in Europe, in the United States,
38:28to say we must learn from that past, we must know that if we begin now
38:33this process of dehumanizing groups, whether they're immigrants,
38:37whether they're our own minorities, we will end up mobilizing
38:42exactly the same forces in the name of order, in the name of science
38:46that led to the horrific genocide of World War II.
38:52France's president present at that ceremony,
38:56he was also present this morning at the Shoah Memorial,
38:59the old Jewish ghetto of the Marais in the heart of Paris.
39:03You were there too, Rachel Fleur-Pardot.
39:07Tell us just, you know, this commemoration,
39:12is it just preaching to the choir?
39:14Is it just an echo chamber when you go to these commemorations?
39:18Or are you reaching out beyond just the group?
39:21I think we are reaching around beyond because there is always that work that is done
39:25that is to bring, you know, children, young adults to join this place
39:30and to listen to the voices of the survivors.
39:33And this is what really this day is about.
39:36This is why really the 27th of January is about.
39:40It is about commemorating those who died during World War II,
39:44those who died in Auschwitz and those who survived with great suffering.
39:50And this is why also I think that this day is for their remembrance
39:54and that any comparison is today really inappropriate.
39:59We have to use this day for what it is.
40:02It is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
40:10And this is what we are speaking about today.
40:13We are speaking about the Shoah.
40:15It is indeed in the past, but it is a day to remember what happened in the past
40:20so we can indeed have from that, learn from that, lessons for the present and the future.
40:27What was the biggest lesson you learned speaking to those survivors?
40:32Well, certainly, just to go back to your point about doctors,
40:35and this is something that does certainly chime with what I learned with the survivors,
40:39is we heard from Leon Weintraub during the ceremony earlier on today.
40:43He is a survivor, but he also was a doctor.
40:46He emigrated to Sweden after surviving the camps.
40:49He was experiencing anti-Semitism in his home country in Poland.
40:53And he said, as a doctor, as a surgeon, it doesn't matter what color someone's skin is,
40:58when I go below the surface, the tissue is always the same,
41:03and we need to be sensitive to other people's differences.
41:06And that really does ring true with all the survivors that I spoke to,
41:09is that underneath it all, we're all human beings, and we are all the same,
41:13and we do need to be sensitive and tolerant to the differences we have between us.
41:17And that's a message that's not obvious?
41:22That's a message that requires to be reminded, unfortunately, more and more.
41:27We can see here in France, there are recent numbers about anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Semitism,
41:34the hate of others is on the rise here in France and across Europe.
41:39Since October 7th, since the terrible massacres that Hamas committed in Israel,
41:44we have seen anti-Semitism explode in France and in Europe and in the world.
41:50And this is really scary, because as we can see,
41:54the voices of the survivors are soon not going to be able to be heard anymore.
41:59And so that is why we have today to tell with strength what happened,
42:04so that, indeed, it does not happen again.
42:07My mother, who is 91 years old, doesn't speak about what has passed during the war.
42:14She decided to speak because of a negationist.
42:18Because of the Holocaust deniers.
42:20Because, and actually, yesterday she told me,
42:24I never imagined what is now.
42:28I'm not afraid of me, because she's a whole woman.
42:32I'm afraid about these children.
42:36She doesn't imagine that the descendants will have problems, not because they are Jewish.
42:46And it's important to insist on the fact that during the war,
42:51Jewish, some people were religious, some people were not religious.
42:58But for German people, a Jewish rest Jewish.
43:03Even if you be converted to Catholic, you continue to be Jewish.
43:09You are shown as a Jewish.
43:12And for us, you know, we make a study in 100 Holocaust survivors
43:19who tell that the situation actually is, for them, very similar with what they lived during the war.
43:28They have the same impression of indifference of political parties.
43:34And they have the same, they agree to see that media, the power of the media.
43:42They don't understand, they never imagine, they don't speak,
43:47because they never imagine that somebody will tell that what,
43:52the Shoah is a eunuch in the history of humanities.
43:58And actually, some people make very horrible comparison.
44:03And that is not good.
44:05An unfiltered world we live in.
44:07I want to thank you, Bruno Alouyat.
44:09I want to thank as well Rachel Flore-Pardo.
44:13Omar Bortoff for being with us from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
44:17Claire Pacalin, thank you for being with us here in the France 24.
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