Luigi Ferri, an Italian, rolls up his left sleeve and shows off the camp number tattooed on his forearm: B 7525. What he experienced brutally tore him from his carefree childhood when he was only twelve. Although he was raised Catholic, in the summer of 1944 he was taken to Auschwitz by the Germans together with his Jewish grandmother. She died in the gas chamber. He survived the hell of the camp almost miraculously.
Photo: Kacper Pempel (Source: Reuters/Forum)
Ferri is one of around seven thousand Auschwitz prisoners who, extremely emaciated, were released on 27 January 1945. In less than five years, over 1.1 million people lost their lives in this largest German concentration and extermination camp. Among the victims were as many as 230 thousand children – Jewish, but also Polish, Roma and other nationalities. A moving testimony to their tragic fate is the objects they left behind: shoes, clothes, toys. They can still be seen today in block five of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.
Apocalypse Time
Adolf Hitler had already set out his radical anti-Semitism, combined with a program to gain "living space" for Germany in the East, in the 1920s in Mein Kampf. While his National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) had little significance, it was dismissed as a dangerous but unrealistic vision.
When Hitler took over as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, many still had the illusion that he would not last long in power. The National Socialists had just over one third of the seats in parliament. They were seemingly at the mercy of their coalition partners and President Paul von Hindenburg. "In two months we will have Hitler so cornered that he will squeal," predicted Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen.
The Nazis, however, dealt with all opposition with surprising speed and established a one-party dictatorship. They were aided in this by the ruthless terror unleashed in the first weeks of their rule. One of its symbols became the concentration camps, intended for Hitler's political opponents and all those whom the new government decided to place outside the pale of society. The regime also targeted the Jewish community, subjected to increasing harassment and repression – from the boycott of trade, through the shameful Nuremberg Laws, to the pogroms during Kristallnacht.
All this turned out to be a prelude to an even greater hecatomb, initiated by the diabolical pact between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939 and their joint attack on Poland in September of the same year. In the conquered territories, German thugs murdered representatives of the broadly understood "Polish leadership class", patients in psychiatric hospitals, and thousands of random people. A tragic fate befell the Jewish population — first crowded into ghettos, and then killed in extermination camps.
Already in the spring of 1940, the Germans opened the Auschwitz concentration camp. Initially, they sent mainly Polish political prisoners there. Among those who died there were clergymen, such as the Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe, politicians, such as former MP Stanisław Dubois, and even children, including 14-year-old Czesława Kwoka from the Zamość region, who was killed by a phenol injection.
In time, Auschwitz also became the central extermination camp, included in the German plan to murder the Jewish population. "Our — Polish Jews — were mostly finished in Treblinka and Majdanek. Here, to Auschwitz, Jews were brought from almost all of Europe," wrote Captain Witold Pilecki, also an Auschwitz prisoner and the author of a shocking report from the camp. In it, we read about the "thousands" of transports of Jews flowing daily, directed "straight to Birkenau", where the gas chambers and crematoria were located.
In addition to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, there were also the Kulmhof, Belzec, and Sobibor extermination camps, as well as numerous other places of mass murder, such as Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev. In just a few years, the German state and its officials managed to murder about six million Jews. The state of Israel did not reach a comparable population until the late 1990s.
Advocates of Millions
When the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main “architects of the Holocaust,” began in Jerusalem in the spring of 1961, prosecutor Gideon Hausner told the court that he was joined by “six million accusers. […] Their blood cries out to heaven, but their voices cannot be heard.” Hausner saw himself as their spokesman.
The voice of the murdered for years has also been the voice of those who survived. The first books about the hell of Auschwitz were published in the 1940s. In Warsaw, horribly destroyed by the Germans, the autobiographical Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau) by a Polish woman, Seweryna Szmaglewska, and To jest Oświęcim (This is Auschwitz!) by the Jewish historian Filip Friedman were published as early as 1945. Szmaglewska had spent over two years in Auschwitz, while Friedman lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust.
Witnesses to history speak to us to this day, sometimes after long years of trauma and silence. Luigi Ferri opened up to Frediano Sessi — the result is the book Il bambino scomparso (The Lost Child) from 2022. However, there will be fewer and fewer such testimonies. Eighty years after the last prisoners of Auschwitz were released, the last generation of Survivors is inexorably passing away.
We must therefore be the advocates of the victims: historians, educators, journalists and all people of good will. We owe this to the murdered, but also to future generations.
"Testament of the Shoah" refers to historical testimonies, documents, or evidence related to the Holocaust (Shoah)—the genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The word "Shoah" is Hebrew (שואה) and means "catastrophe" or "disaster." It is the term commonly used in Israel and Jewish communities worldwide to refer to the Holocaust, distinguishing it from other genocides.
Unlike the word "Holocaust," which has Greek origins and means "burnt offering," "Shoah" carries no religious connotations, making it the preferred term in many Jewish and academic circles. [— Ed.]