Rabbi Lau’s Auschwitz Speech

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945.  Despite having led many groups to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and visited countless former camps and walked through cities and towns which were once filled with Jewish life, and despite the fact that I have heard many first person accounts and read so much about the Shoah, the more I read the less I understand.  I get angry.  I get sad.  I get frustrated.  I get incredulous.  It is an emotional roller coaster.  How could others murder so many people just because of their religion?  How is mankind capable of such cruelty?  Whilst there are rays of light, such as the Righteous Gentiles who risked everything, and the Jews who fought back either physically or morally, the whole period for me in one of overwhelming darkness.

Tuvia talking with a Muslim student and her Catholic teacher from an Austrian high school at Birkenau. Photo (c) T. Book, 2022

I remember one of the times I led a group on the March of the Living, we assembled in front of the blown up gas chambers at Birkenau after having marched in silence from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II along the rail line and through the gates.   Standing next the IDF guard of honour was the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Lau; himself a survivor having being rescued by the American troops as a little boy.  He started the address with the following remarks,

Look around, there are 8,000 youth from all over the world.  That is half the amount of people who were murdered daily in Auschwitz at its peak killing capacity between June and November of 1944 when Hungary’s Jews (including my grandmother’s entire family) were being murdered.

I don’t really recall much of the rest of his speech as the opening stunned us.  The scale of the site and the scale of the murder and the scale of the evil just overwhelmed me.  It’s so important to go at least once to Poland to see what we lost and to see the evidence first hand, especially whilst we can still hear it in first person.  I asked a survivor last year if he could show my son his number on his arm just so he will be able to tell to his children that he saw that humans were branded like cattle.

Finally I realize just how important it is to have our own Jewish state and a strong IDF.  I get very emotional every time I return from Poland home to Israel.  I’ve seen people weep with gratitude, myself included.