Merkel Tours Auschwitz With 'Sense Of Shame' And Warns Of Resurgent Anti- Semitism

Source: NPR

Bogdan Bartnikowski recalls occasionally asking older inmates, out of innocence or desperation, when he would be released from Auschwitz. He recalls, too, the answer that inevitably came back. "You want to be free?" they would tell Bartnikowski, who was 12 at the time. After a mirthless laugh, they would point to the chimneys. "This is how you get out. There is no other way out."

Bartnikowski, now 87, recounted his story Friday during German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland. The visit, Merkel's first official tour of the notorious Nazi concentration camp since she took office 14 years ago, marks just the third time a German leader has visited to the standing symbol of the Holocaust — and the first in about 25 years.

During her visit, Merkel announced that Germany is giving 60 million euros (about $66 million) to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, which marked its 10th anniversary on Friday. The gift doubles what Germany, already the foundation's biggest financial supporter, had previously donated.

"To stand here and speak to you today as Germany's chancellor is anything but easy for me," she said Friday. "I feel a deep sense of shame for the barbaric crimes that were here committed by Germans — crimes that are unfathomable." During her address Friday, she drew a clear line from Auschwitz to the present political situation in Germany, which has recently seen an alarming rise in anti-Semitic violence. Hate crimes targeting Jews last year leaped by nearly 20% over the year before, according to German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer...

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785572011/merkel-tours-auschwitz-with-sense-of-shame-and-warns-of-resurgent-anti-semitism

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Last year a young Jewish, LGBTQ activist told NPR:
"I've seen people spitting out in front of me because I was wearing a kippa. People shouting at me, 'Jew,' in the middle of the streets, in the center of the city. And if I tell people about things I experience, they say, 'What? This happened to you? I didn't even know that there is anti-Semitism today in Germany.' "

- Merkel stated that she was very aware of the distressing shift in Germany:
"We are witnessing and experiencing an attack on the fundamental values of liberal democracy and a very dangerous historical revisionism that serves a hostility that is directed at specific groups," she said. "We are focusing our attention especially on anti-Semitism, which poses a threat to Jewish life in Germany, Europe and beyond."

Merkel added, "Because it is as Primo Levi once said: 'It happened, therefore it can happen again' " quoting the well known Italian Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor.



- Primo Michele Levi, (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi



- Chancellor Merkel spoke to the media Friday during an Auschwitz Foundation event. During the address, she stood in front of the portraits of Jews imprisoned and killed at the death camp.



- Chancellor Merkel walks toward the main railway entrance to Birkenau, the largest of the camps that made up the Auschwitz complex in Poland. It was Merkel's first visit to the former Nazi death camp, an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, since taking office 14 years ago.