The Voices of Auschwitz – Anthony Faiola, Ruth Eglash, and Michelle Boorstein

The Soviet army entered Auschwitz – the network of extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland – on Jan. 27, 1945. The 70th anniversary of the liberation is on Tuesday. A decade ago, 1,500 survivors traveled to Auschwitz to mark the 60th anniversary. This year, organizers are expecting 300. By September of 1941, Auschwitz became an assembly line of death where more than 1 million would perish at the hands of the Third Reich. The vast majority were Jews, but others also died there including ethnic Roma, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Polish prisoners of war.
What follows are the tales of four survivors of Auschwitz. In the U.S., survivor Anna Ornstein, 87, a psychoanalyst who has spent a lifetime treating children in trauma, says humanity has not learned from the Holocaust, as genocide has continued in many parts of the world. (Washington Post)

Auschwitz Survivor: Being Alive Is Best Revenge – Michele Chabin

Shortly after the Nazi invasion of what was then Hungary in May 1944, Renee Ganz’s family and most of the 25,000 Jews in the city of Oradea were forced into cattle cars and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. On Tuesday – Holocaust Remembrance Day – Ganz will return to the death camp for the first time. For her, traveling to Auschwitz is about getting “revenge.” “I have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Germans tried to kill the entire Jewish people but they failed. I am alive. I am here.”  (USA Today)

On Haifa’s “Survivors’ Street,” Memories of the Holocaust Live On – Daphne Rousseau

Along a small road in Haifa about 100 Holocaust survivors are living out their last days side-by-side. About 180,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust are currently living in the Jewish state, according to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. Numerous ceremonies are held for survivors every year and classes about the genocide are compulsory in schools. Older students are likely to make at least one class trip to the former death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. (AFP)

Acknowledge the Righteous Muslims – Robert Satloff

Joseph Naccache is a Jewish survivor of Nazi labor camps in his native Tunisia. His Muslim neighbor Hamza Abdul Jalil hid him inside the bathhouse he owned for two weeks to avoid a German dragnet. The writer is the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (Daily Star-Lebanon)

(Click on the title of any article to see the whole article…Ed.)