On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this 92-year-old survivor said it was a special but gloomy occasion for him.
“It’s a kind of celebration and the fact that those of us who do survive could make a good living for themselves and move on,” Ben Lesser told CBS News in a Zoom video call on Wednesday.
“But of course our dear departed people cannot forget us,” he said.
Wednesday marks 76 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Lesser was familiar with the atrocities there.
He said he survived the labor and death camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau, Poland, two death squads and the infamous Dachau death train – where dozens of train carriages transported the bodies of thousands of prisoners to Dachau at the end of World War II. . Lesser is apparently the last known survivor of the latter.
During the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, some rioters “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts and white supremacist characters hold up.
“It gave me a taste of the past when I was a young boy,” he told CBS News as he pondered the attack on Capitol.
The recent images – combined with years of rising anti-Semitic attacks – does not make Lesser “happy with the current state of affairs.” However, Lesser, the founder of the Zachor Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, devoted his time to helping future generations understand the extent of the Holocaust as a way to combat hatred. He often gives speeches in Germany and even develops a curriculum for schools.
“I tell people that education is very important, because only if you are really knowledgeable can you realize that we are all the same,” he said. “They are all part of humanity. God created us all. So, why can we not live side by side and appreciate our differences, rather than hate them?”
“Hitler and the Nazis did not start the assassination,” he said. “It all started with hatred.”
N recording launched in 2020 showed more than 60% of the millennial years and respondents of Gen Z did not know that 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust. Although Lesser acknowledges that there may always be anti-Semitism in the U.S., he said his biggest concern is “what will happen after the survivors leave?”
“Who is going to talk and teach these children to let future generations know that there was a Holocaust and how it happened and how bad it was,” he said.
“When I see it, when a lot of kids don’t even know what the word Holocaust means, it bothers me,” he said. “And that needs to change. We’re doing our best to try to change that.”