By Miguel Lamas, an IWU-FI leader
22nd January 2025. Between 1940 and 1945, some 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest extermination camp in human history. The gas chambers and crematoria ovens killed up to 5,000 per day. Most were Jews, but there were also left-wing militants, prostitutes, homosexuals, prisoners of war from other countries, and others.
This concentration camp was in Poland, occupied by Nazi Germany in those years of World War II. Prisoners were transported in overcrowded cattle cars with up to eighty people crammed into them, from Italy, France, Hungary, the Baltic, Germany and Poland. Finally, on 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz.
On the eightieth anniversary, a ceremony will be held to repudiate this genocide once again. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, has been invited to participate, as he is also a Jew from a Polish family. He may not be able or willing to go because he is responsible for a new genocide in Gaza today. Even the International Criminal Court – based in The Hague – has warrants for his arrest. Poland, being a member of the ICC, would be legally obliged to arrest him. However, his government made it clear that it would not do so. What is relevant is that, for the first time, Israel’s participation in this event has been called into question.
