Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025, Daily Brief January 27, 2025

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Nazis murdered some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War, mostly Jews (about 1 million), but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others.

As dignitaries from around the world gather at the site for the anniversary today, The Guardian writes that, “Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an abiding symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6 million European Jews, looming large in the world’s collective memory as the embodiment of where hatred, racism and antisemitism can lead.”

But it doesn’t seem to be looming as large in the world’s collective memory as it should.

In a new survey across eight countries in Europe and North America, surprising numbers of adults said they had not heard of the Holocaust. Younger people, ages 18-29, seemed most unaware, with the number of such folks in France at a jaw-dropping 46%.

Last week, at the US presidential inauguration, Elon Musk gave a Nazi-style salute. Twice. Neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists in the US and elsewhere celebrated it as a clear sign of support for white supremacist ideology. Particularly in the context of his repeated public backing of far-right parties, it’s hard to see the gesture as anything else.

Afterwards, Musk – the richest man in the world and now head of the new US Department of Government Efficiency, established by President Trump, himself known for pushing white supremacist ideology – tried to say that what everyone saw wasn’t what everyone saw.

A quote from George Orwell’s 1984 seems appropriate here:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs in the US rightly said: “The salute [by Musk] itself should be enough to warrant condemnation and attention.”

She added that extremists see an action like this and “take it as license for their own violent extremism.”

On this day, International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the struggle between memory and forgetting goes on – and memory seems to be losing.