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Eighty years ago, when allied forces moved through a broken Europe in the last days of World War II, my great -grandfather, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, entered a place that changed it forever: the Nazi concentration camp in Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald.
What he saw there, lots of corpses, skeletal survivors and evidence of unimaginable cruelty, would stay with him for life. Fearing that the world could someday try to deny that it once happened. Then, he took action. He decided to record it in the annals of world history.
The US troops, members of Congress and international journalists immediately ordered to visit the camps and document atrocities.
Gene. Dwight D. Eisenhower listens as an American lieutenant questions a liberated slave worker, the Nazi concentration camp in Ohrdruf, which was released on April 4, 1945. (Photo12/UIG/Getty Images)
“The visual evidence and verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overwhelming,” Hey wrote to General George Marshall, “I deliberately visited the visit to be able to give first -hand evidence of thesis if ever, in the future, there was a tendency to load merely propaganda thesis.”
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That forecast now feels painful prophetic.
In 2020, a national survey conducted by the Conference on Jewish materials against Germany revealed that 63% of millennials and gene of the United States did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Forty -eight percent could not name one of the more than 40,000 concentration fields and Nazi ghettos.
These are not only worrying statistics, they are a warning. In a world where erroneous information extends rapidly, and where anti -Semitism is once again increasing, the thesis gaps in knowledge are dangerous.
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At the same time, anti -Semitic incidents in the United States have reached maximum record. According to the Anti-Defamation League, in 2023, there were 8,873 documented anti-Semitic incidents, the highest number since the ADL began tracing such incidents in 1979.
That is an increase of 140% compared to the previous year. These included physical assaults, vandalism of synagogues and Jewish schools, and a growing presence of anti -Semitic rhetoric in conventional discourse and social media platforms.
Polish prisoners with striped uniforms are in ranks against Nazi officers in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimar, Germany, around 1943. (Frederic Lewis/Getty Images)
This year, by marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, I will participate in the international march of the living, walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau together with the president of the state of Israel, 80 survivors of the Holocaust, survivors of the massacre Hamas of October 7 in Israel and students from all over the world.
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We will walk in silence, but our presence will speak out loud. He will say that we remember. That we testify. That we will carry out the testimonies of those who survived and those who perished. It is an honor, as a general and then the great-grandson of President-Eisenhower, to continue that legacy of ornaments when they were on the ground where the Nazis tried to erase a town.
While my great -grandfather is better remembered for his duration of leadership in war, his legacy as president also includes support for the Jewish people through their presidency. Duration its presidency, Eisenhower supervised the strengthening of the United States or Israel’s right to self -defense, their support for Jewish refugees fleeing from Europe and an unmissable condemnation of anti -Semitism and intolerance in all its formations.
In 1958, the dedicated cornerstone of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, declaring: “We must affirm human dignity and decency. Because unless we do it, civilization is in danger.” He understood that the battle against hatred did not end with war, or with the Jews, it was universal.
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That is still true today. The denial of the holocaust and distortion are no longer dragged into our public speech, they are flooding it. In university campuses, in political rhetoric, and in online forums, attempts to minimize or erase the truths for which Eisenhower and millions of others fought surprisingly do not question themselves. In this context, education is not just a tool, it is a responsibility.
We must teach young people not only what happened in the Holocaust, but also Because It happened: how hate, dehumanization and silence allowed genocide to develop.
The survivors in the Buchenwald concentration camp remain in their barracks after the release of the allies on April 16, 1945. Elie Wiesel, the winning author of the Nobel Prize for “Night”, is in the second bunk from the bottom, seventh from the left. (Corbis/Corbis through Getty Images)
We must ensure that they listen to the voices of the survivors, see the remains of the fields and understand what “never” really demands us.
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When Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf in 1945, he stopped as a general. But his decision to shed light on those horrors was also the act of a human being who was not willing to look the other way. Like his great -grandson, I feel the weight of that decision and the privilege of carrying it forward.
Hey, once, “the hope of the world is that wisdom can judge conflicts between the brothers.” That wisdom begins with memory. With truth. And by ensuring that future generations never forget what he, and so many others, saw with their own eyes.
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