Last Tuesday, Jan. 27, marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The United Nations proclaimed Jan. 27 as the International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2005 to mark Auschwitz’s liberation in 1945, five years after its creation. From the camp’s inception until its liberation by the Red Army, German Nazis murdered 1.1 million people. Although the majority of them were Jews, there were also Poles, the Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war. Seventy thousand prisoners remained even after Aushcwitz’s liberation.
The Polish Parliament declared Auschwitz a memorial in 1947, transforming parts of the site into museum exhibitions so visitors could learn about and reflect on the horrors that occurred. The general exhibits include urns with human ash, camp toilets, sculptures depicting starving prisoners, and fragments of gas chambers. Showcases spread throughout the rooms displayed piles of artificial limbs of people sent to Auschwitz, human hair cut from prisoners, and uniforms people received after being brought to the camp.
Harvard and Yale took a group of students to Hungary and Poland in May 2024 for a Jewish history study trip. The Yale Slifka Center, Mignone Center for Career Success, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Harvard Hillel sponsored the program. The students visited Budapest, Warsaw, and Krakow, with tours of Jewish sites in the towns and Holocaust remembrance sites, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
Sydney Bloch ’25 reflected on the significance of Holocaust Remembrance Day occurring on the day of the liberation of Auschwitz: “When we were at Auschwitz, the tour guide was talking about how they were thinking about a lot of different dates to make Holocaust Remembrance Day, and they wanted to have it be a day of liberation and freedom and hope and joy because you have this horrific event that has occurred. And how do you remember it in a way that does the people who survived it justice?”
Yad Vashem was charged with designing the final permanent exhibit and chose to focus on the Shoah—the Hebrew word for Holocaust. The space uses maps to illustrate the geographic extent of the Holocaust and commemorates the children persecuted during the Holocaust through childhood drawings.
One of the final exhibits in the “SHOAH” permanent installation is the “Book of Names,” a list of people who died in the Holocaust in a book nearly as tall as a human.
“There’s 10 pages of ‘Blochs’ that were killed in the Holocaust. And these are huge pages. Flipping through that was really impactful,” shared Bloch. “There were other people on the trip with very traditional Jewish last names that had 30 or 40 pages worth of just people with their last name killed in the Holocaust. And some people could recognize their family members. And I think that was something that was really jarring to me.”
Lauren Perl ’25 is the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors. In an online testimony, her grandmother, Lore Perl, shares how the memories of the Holocaust were still haunting her even years after her grandmother’s liberation from Ravensbrück as a political prisoner.
“[My grandmother] couldn’t drive to the Lincoln Tunnel because the actual white tile reminded my grandmother of the concentration camp showers,” Perl said.
“I also don’t think people understand that we are seeing a rise in Nazism around the globe,” said Perl. “And specifically, I’m incredibly concerned—something that’s been causing me so much anxiety—is the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland party within Germany and their overt ties to Nazism. And also, there’s increasingly the data about people, young people, not knowing about the Holocaust or denying it or distorting it.”
Global Holocaust education has dramatically worsened in the past few decades, further exacerbating rising anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. A 2025 Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey found that 20% of respondents worldwide had not heard of the Holocaust, and only 48% acknowledged its historical accuracy. Among 18-34-year-olds, this lack of knowledge is even more pertinent, with 39% remaining skeptical of the Holocaust.
This decline in Holocaust awareness is troubling as Holocaust survivors age and pass away. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published a demographic report on Holocaust survivors. 245,000 Jewish survivors are still alive, but these numbers dwindle as natural aging takes its toll. Few survivors may be alive in a decade. Daniel Hochberg ’27, who went on a trip with Jewish student group Meor this past winter, reflected on the increasing number of people around the world who will never have any firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust. “We are the last generation that will actually get to know a Holocaust survivor.”
On Feb. 3, the Institute of Politics JFK Jr. Forum hosted Holocaust survivor Magda Bader for an event titled “80 Years Since Liberation: The Legacy of the Holocaust.” During the event, Bader recounted her harrowing experience surviving Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and her escape from a satellite camp in Tannenberg. She also reflected on life after the Holocaust and shared her thoughts on the troubling persistence of hate and division in the world today.
“When I talk to you, still I remember this all vividly, and it’s very sad that today, I have to talk 80 years later about things that worry me, and that people can’t get along with each other, and there is so much hate and so much distrust,” she said to the packed audience. “I wish and I hope people could learn to live like human beings with each other side by side, and that’s why I talk to students—high school kids and college kids—but I am sorry to see that eight years later, this is still an important subject.”
Perl shared how the ability to preserve Holocaust stories and share them with future generations causes her “deep anxiety and fear.”
“I know so many survivors who have had their tales memorialized in [recordings], and yet it’s without it being readily accessible in terms of you looking that person in the eye or seeing the number on their arm, right?” She asked. “I don’t think people that don’t have this intergenerational trauma can truly comprehend.”
Hochberg agreed, “Their stories are fading. It’s a lot easier to read a book and not believe 100% and think ‘oh that’s hyperbole, oh that’s craziness’ rather than look someone in the eye who’s been through all that, who’s telling you their story.”
Bloch said, “Realistically, we’re one to two generations removed from it…But realistically, I think seeing Jewish hate on the rise makes me fear a lot more about what could happen again.”
Hochberg also explained the connection he notes between the Holocaust and modern-day conversations around Israel are. “The Holocaust, I think, is what created the state of Israel as we know it today. I think the Holocaust is what made us as a Jewish people realize that we needed our own place to live, and that we couldn’t rely on the kindness of whatever political machine happened to look favorably upon us for 100 years.”
Hochberg continued, “Especially in light of the recent wave of call it what you will, anti-Zionism, anti-semitism, it’s really the same thing—it’s wanting to destroy the state of Israel, and by extension, what you’re doing there is you want to destroy the Jewish people… No other country will ever protect us forever.”
Hannah Davis ’25 (hannahdavis@college.harvard.edu) and Jordan Wasserberger ’27 (jwasserberger@college.harvard.edu) write News for the Independent.