“There is indeed a great danger that the Holocaust will lose its meaning.. Victims have emotional resonance, moral legitimacy, they are very important (…) I can’t convey [lo ocurrido] in the same way, because I didn’t live it, and it’s irreplaceable,” he reflects. Nico Wouters, Belgian historian specialized in World War II and the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Wouters fears that the Holocaust story will eventually become just another historical fact, “like Napoleon.”

“A dying old man is like a burning library: he is irreplaceable,” admits Frederic Cray. This is especially true in the case of Holocaust survivors, he argues, and explains that the impact that victims’ stories have when they visit schools to tell their story (and ensure that what happened is not forgotten) is always greater stronger than when the teacher tells it. “Some of the survivors were the same age as the students they were addressing at the time the events took place (…) I once lived as a survivor asked students to close their eyes telling his story because he didn’t want to be seen as the older man he was, but as the younger man he was then, the one who around the same age when he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Of course, the impact of such stories fades,” Krahay reflects.

“I didn’t have a childhood, they excluded childhood from my life”

Irene Shashar knows very good what it means to talk about the Holocaust. She survivor. He is 86 years old and now lives in Israel, although he was born and raised for part of his childhood in Poland and then settled in Peru. Irene, née Ruth, was forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto when she was barely 3 years old, but when she and her mother went out in search of food and found her father murdered on the kitchen floor, they decided to escape. . . Her mother changed her name and named her Irene. They lived together in the sewers until they moved to the other side of the city, where they hid for years. Irene had to live in small closets with her doll. Her mother told her to behave, not to make noise or call her, and that it would all be over soon. “I thought the end of World War II depended on me”The European Parliament reported this.

“I didn’t have a childhood, childhood was erased from my life, unfortunately”“, he says in a conversation with RFI. How can you recover from this? Well, you get up and move forward with the hope that tomorrow will be better. If you get wet in your own mud, it will be difficult for you to move forward, your shoes will get dirty, but to reach the finish line, you have to work hard,” she explains. “My victory is what I brought to the world, I did what Hitler did not want me to do (…) I am a mother, I am a grandmother, for my There are already two generations back, and if my grandchildren have children, there will already be three generations.”

So Irene continues to tell her story. In the United Nations, in the European Parliament and in schools. He acknowledges that “there is a danger” that the Shoah may lose its significance over time. “I go to school and tell my story and the moral of it all the time and that’s how I pass on my backpack. I can’t say that they don’t understand me, but They can’t enter my soul to know what I’ve experienced, but through books that many survivors wrote; Through the work of Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem), we can thus penetrate the consciousness of future generations so that they understand that what happened was so infernal that it can never, ever happen again,” he says.

Irina actually wrote book. But not just any one, but one for future generations, called “I defeated Hitler. The true story of Irene”a children’s book in which she reveals that her name was Ruth and that her childhood was very different from others, but now she lives to tell the story. The survivor says she is suffering from the current situation in the Middle East.. “For me, October 7th was like déjà vu, like when I was in Warsaw at the age of 7, hiding in bomb shelters (…) October 7th somehow changed the behavior of the Israelis. For me, as a survivor, it was a tragedy,” he says.

“The hatred of the past is still alive”

For Sashar October 7th exists “resurgence of anti-Semitism” And “Proof that the hatred of the past is still alive”. “Jews no longer feel safe in Europe. After the Holocaust, this is unacceptable. “Never again” should really mean “never again,” he argues. “I have a dream: for my children, all children, to live in the Middle East in a world free of hatred, especially towards us Jews. In my dream, Jews find safety wherever they choose to settle. And anti-Semitism is finally a thing of the past.”

The numbers prove it. Anti-Semitism has increased in Europe. Bella Swiatlowsky, a Holocaust survivor, was a child who was hidden by neighbors after her parents were deported to Brussels, and says she knows of cases where people no longer dared to place a mezuzah (a small scroll containing verses from the Torah and placed in a small wooden box to the right of the doors of the houses) due to anti-Semitic threats.