Holocaust survivors issue a warning 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz

STORY: Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi has a warning for the world: don’t let history repeat itself.

Asked how he views the rise of antisemitism and right-wing populism, he said:

“It’s very scary. It’s really scary that it’s like this. And that’s why we have to do something about it in the first place. Because the Shoah didn’t start with Auschwitz, but with words, silence, and society looking away. . And everyone has to do something to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. “

The 92-year-old survived Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that was liberated 80 years ago by Soviet troops.

He is among a group of survivors who are expressing concern about the current political situation.

When she visited the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, she remembered being a little girl and about to die in Auschwitz.

He said the jailers made a mistake and thought he was dead and left him behind.

For decades he did not talk about his experience.

In 2016, he found a list of the dead with the names of his mother and brother.

“And then I was able to be sad, to cry, I couldn’t do that before.”

Ninety-six-year-old Teresa Regula was also brought to Auschwitz.

The numbers the Nazis wrote on Regula’s arm are hard to find, but they are fresh in his mind:

“Twenty-two, zero, eleven,” she said.

As a healthy child, he contracted measles, measles and scarlet fever in the camp.

The thought of being reunited with his father kept him alive.

Those dreams were dashed when he later found out that he had been accidentally shot by Russian forces while liberating the concentration camp he was in.

Speaking from his home in Krakow, Poland, he says that terrible things are happening in the world.

“(People) have not reached the end,” he said, adding that he chose not to have children so that they would not go through things like what he suffered.

Janina Iwanska, a Polish Catholic woman who was sent to Auschwitz around the same time as Regula in 1944, also remained childless.

He is worried about the future generations of children.

“What will their future be like? Because I see in the dark. It’s dim. Because I remember before 1939, hatred was created between people… they pitted certain people against each other, treating others as a slightly inferior, worse race. And what happened to it? But what is there now is still on a very, very large scale. “