When the Russians arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Primo Levi wasn’t wearing a beret. He and his camp-mate, Charles, had just taken Sómogyi’s remains outside. He had died in the night. The Russians arrived right at that moment. Levi later wrote, “Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret.” In this moment when the soldiers arrived, when Levi’s 11-month-long ordeal as a prisoner at Auschwitz came to an end, he regretted not being able to show respect to the soldiers whose impending arrival had forced the Nazis to flee, abandoning the camp and those prisoners deemed too sick and weak to survive the march to the west.
Auschwitz, the German name for the Polish city of Oświęcim, is located approximately 60 kilometers west of Krakow. Established in 1940, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was an important part of the “final solution,” the Nazi’s deliberate mass murder of European Jews. The killings that took place at Aushwitz-Birkenau are part of the Holocaust, which refers to the Nazi’s murder of approximately 6 million Jews during World War Two (1939-1945). Millions of others, including Soviet prisoners of war, non-Jewish Poles, Romani, peoples with disabilities, and political opponents, were also killed.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex came to include a concentration camp, an extermination camp, and a forced-labor camp where the detained were forced to labor in nearby factories. An estimated 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews, were sent to Auschwitz from across Europe were sent to. Approximately 1.1 million were killed, most of them in gas chambers.
On January 27, 1945, when the Russians arrived, only 7,000 prisoners were left.
The anniversary of the Russians’ liberation of Auschwitz has been commemorated as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust (often shortened to International Holocaust Remembrance Day) since 2006, the year after the United Nations passed Resolution 60-7 in 2005. With Resolution 60-7, the UN condemned “without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.”
January 27 is a day to remember the victims of the Holocaust and to educate ourselves about past and present forms of hate. On January 27, we remember.
Want to learn more? Visit McGill Library's virtual exhibit of holocaust books.
