Parliamentarians and leaders visited Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the recent EJA conference in Poland.
“It’s been in many ways a life changing visit,” says UK Secretary of State for Education Nadhim Zahawi. “I have read many books. I’ve watched many film reels. I’ve been to Yad Vashem. But until you come here to Auschwitz-Birkenau, you don’t really begin to understand the industrial scale of the murders, the atrocities that took place.”
Regina Suchowolski-Sluszny, a Holocaust survivor and president of FORUM der Joodse Organisaties says that she came to Auscwitz to ‘honor the parents of my husband.”
“They were Belgian Jews and when they arrived here the same day they went to the gas chambers,” Suchowolski-Sluszn says. “Through these people I want to honor all of the million and a half who were killed here. This is a place it has to be known by everyone in the whole world because what happened was so terrible that a lot of people can’t understand that it happened.”
Zahawi said that “in many ways we can fall silent and hear the anguish of those mothers and children and fathers and grandparents as they perished.”
He adds: “It just makes me more determined to go home back to the United Kingdom and double our efforts to bring our children to see it, to experience Auschwitz. WE all have to redouble our efforts to deal with the scourge of anti-Semitism.”
Suchowolski-Sluszn comapred anti-Semitism to “an illness.”
“We all work to make it disappear but we have to start educating the children when they are 5-6 years old,” she says. “Then maybe we can arrive to a point that this will never happen again. Because it can happen tomorrow.”
Zahawi notes that it is “important for him as Secretary of Education” to be there and to ensure that funding for the Holocaust Edcuation Trust continues, and to “make sure that all our universities follow the IHRA anti-Semitism definition, and help university leadership in my country to make all our universities places where Jewish students can feel safe and feel protected and feel supported.”