80 years since Auschwitz was liberated the world stands together and says ‘never again’

Eighty years ago today Europe was a battlefield. The world was coming towards the dying days of the . Across the continent, people were in mourning for all that had been lost during a brutal war.

In the concentration camps, Jewish prisoners could hear the gunshots in the distance.

They could hear that the noise was coming closer and ever closer. They lived in hope that their violent oppressors might be defeated, that they themselves might survive the war and live to see freedom.

The Nazi leadership realised that defeat was imminent. As the Allied armies advanced across Europe, one of the Nazis’ key priorities was to evacuate the concentration and labour camps, moving the last surviving remnants of European Jewry – those who had survived the terrifying ‘selections’ where SS doctors identified who would live and who would die; the exhausting slave labour; and the starvation diets – back towards Germany.

On so-called death marches, if a prisoner could not walk, they were murdered. Thousands froze to death in the subzero temperatures.

Eventually, those who survived this ordeal reached concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and so began again the routines of roll call in the freezing cold, beatings, starvation and murder.

But finally, despite the Nazis’ attempts to hide the evidence of their crimes, their horrendous crimes were laid bare as the Soviet forces liberated the notorious concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By the time that the battle-hardened soldiers entered the camp, very few prisoners were left. And yet the scenes that greeted them defied belief.

The Nazis had left behind those who were too sick to walk, and the few children who had survived the horrors of the camps – children who had barely any memory of normal life outside of the barbed wire.

In the months that followed the liberation of Auschwitz, emaciated prisoners in camps across Europe were told that they were, finally, free. Just a few months later in April 1945, it was British soldiers – the Eleventh Armoured Division – who liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where tens of thousands of prisoners had been sent as the war edged to a close.

Soldiers who had experienced the brutality of the battlefield were not prepared for the sights, sounds and smells that greeted them – the piles of corpses; the emaciated survivors, many too weak to stand; the thousands who died in the days after the liberation – those who were liberated but never lived a day outside of the barbed wire.

They were not prepared to have experienced something that would live with them every single day, for the rest of their lives.

Eighty years on from the moment of liberation at Auschwitz, I will be standing at the camp.

The place that the Nazis evacuated, that they hoped would remain a secret, will be broadcast into screens around the world. Some of the few remaining survivors of the camps of Europe, those people that the Nazis hoped to eradicate any memory of, will stand on the tracks that once led straight to the crematoria, shoulder to shoulder with their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – generations that the Nazis hoped would never be brought into the world.

They will stand surrounded by world leaders, whose presence highlights that we will never allow their painful experiences to be forgotten.

On this landmark anniversary I think of the survivors I have had the privilege to get to know.

Renee, who was deported from the Łódź Ghetto to Auschwitz. To this day she remembers seeing her father jump from the cattle wagon, and amidst the chaos he disappeared. It was the last time she ever saw him. Her voice always breaks as she says that he was gone, without a kiss or a goodbye.

I think of Lily, whose younger sister and mother were sent straight to the gas chambers. By some miracle she managed to survive with two of her sisters. She managed to keep with her a gold pendant that her mother had given to her, hidden in the heel of a shoe and later, in a piece of bread.

I think of Kitty, who at just 16 years old was sent to Auschwitz where she survived for 20 long, painful months. I think of how as a teenager she had to learn how to survive, to never steal from the living but to search the pockets of the dead. How she had to make choices that no-one should ever have to make at such a young age.

I think of Zigi, who arrived at the camp with his grandmother and who saw things no child should have to see. Every time he shared his painful memories he would end by imploring the audience ‘please, do not hate.’

And of course those incredible individuals, who went on to share their testimonies, lived with this trauma for the rest of their lives, they all carried it with them.

But their stories are not the ‘normal’ stories of the Holocaust. Because the story of the Holocaust, on the whole, is not the story of survival. But rather of murder.

And so I also think of people like Zalman Gradowski, who wrote a note to future readers – all of us – urging them to ‘comprehend the reality’ of what happened at Auschwitz.

He was later murdered by the Nazis in an attempted uprising in the camp.

But how do we honour Zalman’s wishes? How can we – in 2025 – comprehend the reality of a place that defies our imagination, that defies humanity?

It is impossible to imagine the horrors that they experienced, but we must try to understand. And 80 years on,​ comprehending the reality, as best we can, has never been more vital.

Eyewitnesses are rapidly dwindling. Their memories need to live on, even beyond their lifetimes.

And the antisemitism that led to the gas chambers is still alive and well.

The explosion of hate across the globe in the 15 months since the terrorist attack on by Hamas on October 7, 2023 means that this is not just something of the past, but something we have to

reject and call out time and again.

Every time I visit Auschwitz I read the words of George Santayana, who famously said ‘those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

So as we look back and honour the victims, as we pay tribute to those who somehow survived, as we stand at the deadliest site, 80 years on, we will say in one voice – we will never forget.

Karen Pollock is Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust.