As Europe faces a new wave of extreme nationalism, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz looks back
Albrecht Weinberg at his home in Leer, Germany . Weinberg survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen. Photograph: Focke Strangmann/Getty
Four years older than Anne would be now, Weinberg remembers he was “living between the living and the bodies”, when the British soldiers arrived and liberated Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover. He is now one of a dwindling number of survivors of the Nazi extermination of European Jews. Those first 20 years of his life have haunted everything that followed. Even now, in his last years, it won’t let him go.
Albrecht Weinberg's prisoner number, 116927, tattooed on his arm at the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1943. Photograph: Friedemann Vogel/EPA Weinberg was thrown out of school in 1936, aged 11, but the lowest point came three years later. In the early hours of November 9th, 1938, neighbours broke into the Weinberg house, trashed the interior and ordered the shocked family up and out. As locals cheered and chanted “dirty Jews”, Flora and her children, along with other local Jewish women and children, were locked up in a local slaughterhouse.
“There were old people, people with handicaps, but no ladder or steps down, so they simply fell out and others trampled over them,” he says. “We had no idea what Auschwitz was.”Of the 950 people in the transport, he was one of the few not sent directly to the gas chambers. Instead he became one of 35,000 slave labourers in the Buna-Monowitz labour camp, also known as Auschwitz III, where German chemicals companies produced synthetic rubber and petrol.
“The hate we experienced in our youth, we carried that with us our whole lives,” he says. “I still just don’t understand it.” Forced labour at a locksmith's shop in Auschwitz under the command of an SS-Rottenfuhrer, 1942-1943. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty “The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily,” he wrote. “Thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
Höss returned to Auschwitz one last time in April 1947 – for his execution. Despite his own testimony, denial of what had happened there – that there had even been gas chambers at Auschwitz – was already up and running. Two years ago, a United Nations report found that 16 per cent of Holocaust-related content on the big social-media platforms denies or distorts the fundamental facts.
That medium is ideal, however, for simplistic history, populism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Even in Germany, he says, social media is smashing taboos in public discourse. Among those concerned survivors is Anita Lasker-Walfish, whose ability to play the cello saved her life in Auschwitz. Now 99 and in poor health, she has passed the torch to her Berlin-based daughter Maya, a therapist, author and documentary film-maker. After decades of public speaking and education, she describes her mother as “deeply concerned and upset” about what is going on.
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