Statement by Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, on the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, January 27, 2015
On January 27, 1945 – seventy years ago today – Anatoly Shapiro was among the first officers from the Red Army to enter the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the Polish town of Oswiecim. More than half of Shapiro’s battalion had been killed in brutal fighting prior to that day, but nothing had prepared him for the sight of the first group of prisoners, “who looked like skeletons, wearing striped clothing and rags on their feet.” Decades later, Shapiro recalled, they were “so weak they could not turn their heads.”
The first building he came to was labeled “Women.” Inside, he said, “I saw blood, dead people, and in between them, women still alive and naked.” Shapiro said of the horrors he observed, simply: “It was unbelievable.” The soldiers under Shapiro’s command were so overwhelmed that they asked permission to leave the barracks, but he ordered them to accompany him from building to building, so they could see what the Nazis had done. When they entered the children’s barracks, they found only two children left alive, who shouted out in fear, sure that Shapiro had come to kill them. Shapiro himself was Jewish.
SS officers in Auschwitz had required children like these to be measured next to a three-feet-high bar. Children who could walk beneath the bar were sent to the gas chambers; while those who were taller than three feet were considered useful enough to be allowed to live, albeit in the most deplorable and inhuman conditions. Sensing what was at stake even though no one had told them, the children often strained on their tiptoes to reach their heads above that bar.
More than one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. More than six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Countless Roma, people with disabilities and homosexuals were also victims. Today, as we reflect on the unspeakable evil that occurred at Auschwitz, and the immeasurable suffering that the Holocaust inflicted on millions of individuals and families, it should horrify, sadden and enrage us just as it did Shapiro and other camp liberators seventy years ago.
So much of what occurred in the Holocaust continues to feel unbelievable, and it is precisely for that reason that we must continue to force ourselves to look directly at the evil of Auschwitz. Like Shapiro and the Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, or the American soldiers who liberated Dachau, or the British soldiers who liberated Bergen-Belsen, or any of the other Allies who stopped the deadly machinery at the Nazi camps, we must confront the fact that the unbelievable both occurred and can occur.
And today, as every day, we must force ourselves to see that just as human beings could commit these heinous crimes, other human beings could stop them. That if the liberation of the concentration camps is one of humanity’s most necessary feats, then the fact that it took so long to liberate them is one of humanity’s greatest shames. Even today, as atrocities are perpetrated against the innocent, we must find a way to strengthen our collective response. If what Shapiro saw that day is a reminder that the unbelievable is possible, the fight of the liberators must inspire us to face down the unbelievable, wherever it occurs, and to realize the promise of “never again” today and forever more.
Source: United States Mission to the United Nations Office of Press and Public Diplomacy
