Recent years have seen a sharp extremely alarming rise in Holocaust denial and Antisemitism in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and European Union. For too long we have allowed elements of the Holocaust to become trivialized. Anti-vaccination lies in the wake of COVID have seen people make disgustingly false comparisons between this and the Holocaust. Examples include a hat manufacturer in Tennessee producing fake anti-vax yellow stars to the words on Auschwitz’s gate, “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free) becoming a fixture of anti-vax and Neo-Nazi demonstrations.
Allowing this to go unchecked is a disgrace to the memory of those who lost their lives at Auschwitz, as well as the lucky few who survived. The stories of Holocaust survivors such as Auschwitz survivor Siggi Wilzig, the feature of the new book Unstoppable, are as important as ever in combatting this rising tide of Neo-Nazism and Antisemitism.
About Auschwitz
Located in Occupied Poland, Auschwitz was the largest Nazis’ concentration camp, comprising a large complex of 40 forced labor and extermination camps. The camp quickly earned a reputation for being among the most brutal of the Nazis’ concentration camps, with beatings and torture over the most trivial things being common.
Out of the 1.3 million people who were sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died.
Included in that number were 960,000 Jews (of whom 865,000 were gassed upon arriving) as well as 74,000 ethnic Poles, 21,000 Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
Anne Frank and her family were sent to Auschwitz before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen.
Survivors of Auschwitz include Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi – and Siggi Wilzig.
About Siggi
Siggi Wilzig was born in what is now Western Poland in 1926. When the Holocaust began, he and other members of his family were captured and sent to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In later years, Wilzig estimated that about 59 members of his family were murdered by the Nazis. He was the only member of his school class of 1,500 to survive the Holocaust.
At Auschwitz, Wilzig lied about his age, claiming he was 18, as those younger were often immediately executed. He then survived years of brutal internment and forced labor, often tricking Nazi guards into believing he was an expert in whatever needed to be done, thus, enabling him to avoid being selected for extermination.
Wilzig survived Auschwitz and two death marches, being saved when the US Army liberated his camp on May 5, 1945.
After he emigrated to America, he went from a penniless starved Auschwitz survivor to a billionaire philanthropist and associate of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel.
The generation that survived the Holocaust grows thinner by the day as we move further from those horrific events, making it all the more important to counteract fascism, Neo-Nazism, and Antisemitism with stories such as Wilzig’s.
