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KRAKOW — As she prepared to return to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday, Miriam Ziegler vividly recalled how it felt to be a little girl orphaned by the Nazis and left alone in a world ruined by war.
Eighty years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp, the 89-year-old Ziegler said Monday the rising tide of “hatred” around the world makes her fear that history might be ready to repeat itself.
“I’m afraid that it can happen again. For my children, for my grandchildren,” she said. “I was lucky enough to survive.”
Ziegler and fellow Canadian Howard Chandler, 96, were among the Auschwitz survivors in attendance Monday as the world came together to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation. Dozens of world leaders, including King Charles, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, were in Poland for the event.
While the assembled leaders were invited to lay wreaths and candles, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum allowed only the survivors to speak during the ceremony itself.
Polish President Andrzej Duda spoke before the official event after laying a wreath on what is known as the “death wall,” where Nazis assembled their prisoners in lines to be shot and killed. He said Poland preserves sites like Auschwitz so that the world can remember the lessons of the past.
Ziegler said the world may be forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust now.
“I have to keep telling the story. It shouldn’t happen again. It shouldn’t happen, doesn’t matter — any nation,” Ziegler said.
Ziegler was placed in an orphanage after the camp was freed and eventually moved to Canada.
She said that while it’s hard to return to those dark memories, she believes God spared her life so that she could tell the world what she witnessed.
More than six million Jews — including Ziegler’s family — were killed in the Holocaust as the Nazi regime sought to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population during the Second World War. Historians estimate more than one million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Chandler recalled the day he watched German soldiers come to his village and force Jewish men to shave off their beards in public.
“The Catholic people, our neighbours, were standing on the sidewalk laughing. There was one family that lived across from us … she says, ‘Don’t be so joyful with what they’re doing to the Jews. They’re going to start with the Jews, they’re going to finish with us,'” Chandler said. “Very smart woman.”
“If you don’t nip it in the bud when this happens, it is going to spread as we see now,” he added. “(Antisemitism) is a curse.”
Chandler, his brother and their father were sent to a slave labour camp in Wierzbnik, Poland. They lived and worked there for two years before being taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Chandler survived death marches to Germany before being reunited with his brother in the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimer, Germany.
Both were freed in Terezin, Czech Republic, after the war ended.
Like Ziegler, Chandler said he believes he has a duty to warn the world about what he experienced.
“Auschwitz didn’t come down from the sky. It started with words, and it ends with a chimney, being burned and going out in smoke,” he said.
“Nobody, except the Holocaust survivors who experienced this, can feel what is coming. It’s not only our duty, but the duty of humanity to make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody.”
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, told those assembled for the ceremony that the Holocaust was caused by “step-by-step antisemitism” and warned that he sees parallels around the world today.
“This is not 1933 … this is 2025; the hatred of Jews has its willing supporters then and it has them now,” he said.
Antisemitism has grown worldwide in recent years. B’nai Brith’s annual audit reported a record high number of documented incidents of antisemitism in Canada in 2023, including 77 episodes of violence. The previous year saw just 25 reports of violent antisemitic incidents.
The federal government announced Monday it will provide just under $3.4 million in new funding for initiatives to combat antisemitism and provide education about the Holocaust.
Most of the money, $1.3 million, will go to the United Nations international program on Holocaust and genocide education.
The rest is being divided among the Montreal Holocaust Museum, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, the Toronto Holocaust Museum, the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, and the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island.
Fewer than 50 survivors were in attendance at the ceremony in Poland – less than one-quarter of the number that attended the 75th anniversary in 2020.
Trudeau met with both Ziegler and Chandler in Poland just ahead of the event and said he felt “blessed” to meet them and hear their stories.
“It’s a time in the world where we need to be reminded what ‘never again’ means, more than ever before,” Trudeau said at the start of their meeting.
In Ottawa, speakers at a ceremony at the National Holocaust Memorial issued similar warnings.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recalled his visit 15 years ago to Auschwitz as part of the March of the Living.
“We had all hoped that we had left the ugly, authoritarian, socialist ideologies of fascism and communism behind, but they came roaring back with extreme and radical movements,” he said.
Rachel Bendayan, federal minister of official languages and MP for Outremont in Montreal, cited examples of rising antisemitism in her own community over the last two years.
“From Australia, to Germany, and to the United States, where we recently saw public figures riling up crowds with salutes associated with the Third Reich, on platforms large and small, we see the normalization of hate,” she said. “We must fight back.”
Before Monday’s ceremony, Trudeau visited House 88, the former home of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolph Höss.
The windows of the house — including one in the room where Höss’s children slept — look onto the grounds of the death camp.
The house was purchased recently by the Counter Extremism Project and turned into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization.
Trudeau met with Duda following the tour. Both remarked on how this is likely to be the final major gathering of Auschwitz survivors.
Trudeau is scheduled to meet with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday before returning to Canada.
— With files from Sarah Ritchie in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2025.
David Baxter, The Canadian Press