The 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp - Oświęcim in Polish, later Germanized as Auschwitz - is an event of great symbolic, political and ethical significance that brought together, alongside the English King Charles III, German and Polish leaders and living camp inmates. Although the Russian Red Army is most responsible for the liberation of this brutal concentration camp, the Russian representative has not been a welcome guest since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, and this year, the commemoration in Auschwitz, which coincides with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was not attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Although Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk agreed that Netanyahu needed to be given security guarantees and to be allowed to attend the commemoration - motivating their own decisions with the symbolic importance of Auschwitz, but at the same time dividing the Polish public - the Israeli prime minister nevertheless decided to abstain and not appear.
But Bibi - as he is affectionately called by his supporters - raged: on Platform X, he accused the International Criminal Court of an anti-Semitic attack on Israel, and called Hamas the new Nazis who would be defeated "once and for all". He also appeared in court in Tel Aviv on the same day, where he faces three charges of corruption, influence peddling and bribery, making him the only Israeli prime minister to be prosecuted by the authorities of his home country in history. There, too, Netanyahu raged: the indictment for corruption is purely political, and his hearing was not postponed even though he is in the post-operative phase - he had prostate surgery - and he used the public moment to point out, to the detriment of his opponents, that he is not suffering from a terminal illness.
Auschwitz is today a special commemorative site visited annually by millions of visitors who experience the drama of this site in Poland, but at the same time, data shows that many Europeans, imbued with conspiracy theories and immersed in various dynamics of anti-Semitism, do not perceive the tragedy of Auschwitz as important and true at all. Therefore, the context of this year's commemoration is somewhat more complex than it has been in recent history, so the organizers - rightly - decided that the event itself would be devoid of political messages, and that the protagonists would be living camp inmates, people who directly experienced all the negativities of that tragic period of human civilization. Auschwitz, a complex of concentration camps, large, small and labor camps, was a major part of the final solution to the Jewish question, in which between 1-1,5 million people and human destinies cruelly ended. It is the site of the largest execution of European Jews, then Roma, Poles and other prisoners from other countries. A place so horrible that - when Russian soldiers liberated it and the first media reports began to circulate - it was quickly concluded that the world had never seen such atrocity before. The collective humiliation and mass destruction that were organized in Auschwitz in an absolutely bestial manner, through gas chambers and other killing and experimental laboratories, are an example of evil in its almost purest form. Human categories can never be the same after Auschwitz. Some wondered why God allowed such suffering, others wondered what it was in the human psyche, individual and collective, that it was capable of committing such atrocities? All possible answers, from theological to ethical, have never provided a completely meaningful answer to the question of why Auschwitz happened, but they have generated different positions, from sincerely pacifist to extremely militant.
One of the survivors of the concentration camp, Jona Laks, would say that the lesson learned from perhaps the darkest period in human history, such as Auschwitz, is that every human soul has the right to life. This message of hers, simple, plastic and completely understandable, universalizes the suffering of one people, the Jewish people, and she sees the symbolism of Auschwitz in affirming the understanding that every person has the right to life. However, there are other answers: the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, the incriminated Israeli Prime Minister, Benzion Mileikowsky - who would later Hebraize his own surname - was born in Warsaw and, under the burden of his own history, saw the future after Auschwitz quite differently. Like many Jews who managed to escape during those years, he would find refuge in today's Israel. A Zionist - this is how Benzion defined himself - an eminent professor, but with many controversial views even within the Jewish body itself, he believed that there was simply no peace with the Arabs. On his 100th birthday, he said in a short message that Iran is evil personified, while Israel is an example of how a country effectively deals with an existential threat, which he saw in the Palestinians and Arab countries. It was precisely this category of threat that marked the now long political career of his son Benjamin: even in, in the opinion of many, his best political period, when he revolutionized the Israeli economy as finance minister, Bibi's main postulate was - he spoke boastfully about it - to create material resources that would be spent on the defense and protection of Israel against any kind of existential threat. The epilogue of his political views and career was best presented by the International Criminal Court imputing responsibility for brutal and inhumane war crimes during the war between Israel and Hamas. Thus, Prime Minister Netanyahu spent International Holocaust Remembrance Day fighting against international and domestic justice, on Platform X and in court in Tel Aviv. Auschwitz is, after all, a place for people like Jona Laks, who concluded from the darkness of her own and collective history that every human soul has the right to life.
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