Today marks 80 years since Russian troops liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the world found out how truly evil Hitler’s regime was.

Over 6 million Jews and others were killed by the Nazis between the years of 1933 and 1945. Read that number again, over SIX MILLION souls were lost. Men, women, and children. All because they were Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, or deemed as enemies of the state. 

Do you know how many concentration camps were built by Hilter’s regime? More than you think. 

Most people are familiar with the names of the major concentration camps – Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka, for example – but few realize that these were not the only places where Jews and other prisoners were held by the Nazis. Each of the 23 main camps had subcamps, nearly 900 of them in total. These included camps with euphemistic names, such as “care facilities for foreign children,” where pregnant prisoners were sent for forced abortions.

The Nazis established about 110 camps starting in 1933 to imprison political opponents and other undesirables. The number expanded as the Third Reich expanded and the Germans began occupying parts of Europe. When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum first began to document all of the camps, the belief was that the list would total approximately 7,000. However, researchers found that the Nazis actually established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.

Given that sheer mind-boggling number of camps across the whole of the Third Reich, its absolutely a miracle that more people weren’t murdered by Hitler’s Nazis during that twelve year period.

"Arbeit macht frei" – work makes one free, was a cynical welcome at the Auschwitz I camp. SS guards often told prisoners of #Auschwitz that the only way out from the camp was through the chimney of the crematorium.

Watch a video about the history of this sign at Auschwitz:… pic.twitter.com/Y7RyYWYaSH

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 27, 2025

It’s also a miracle that so many survived the camps. And today, there are only about 200,000 left to tell the world why we cannot and must not forget The Holocaust.  

Tova Friedman is one survivor. She was a child at Auschwitz. 

But as Friedman, a child imprisoned at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and her cohort grow older, worries are growing that the Holocaust is being distorted, denied and even forgotten.

“I share this story, like many others who do, because we cannot forget all those innocent men, women and children who were slaughtered just because they were Jewish,” said Friedman, who also noted that the Nazis targeted others, including disabled people, gays and lesbians and other ethnic minorities.

Friedman knows better than most the importance of words and warnings: From her earliest days, she remembers her mother telling her how to behave in the Jewish ghetto in Poland. Don’t look soldiers in the eye. Don’t cry or whine or complain. Don’t do anything that will make them kill.

“I tell the world to remember them. Memory is very, very important, ” she said.

“My mother didn’t cover anything up,” Friedman said, and telling her daughter the full extent of Nazi brutality, even though she was still a small child, probably saved her life.

Friedman survived the ghetto, and later Auschwitz-Birkenau, but just barely. She remembers being tattooed. Having her head shaved. Being taken to the gas chambers with other children, being told to strip, and then, inexplicably, being spared.

There are a multitude of similar stories where survivors were inexplicably (I look to HIM on that) spared the gas chambers. And they survived horrific conditions. No food or water much of the time. Brutally beaten on a regular basis. Forced to work in terrible weather conditions and medical care was only in place for certain reasons. 

When I say the survivors were skin and bones when they were freed from that hell, I mean exactly that. 

Eighty years ago today, over 7,000 prisoners of the German Nazi camp #Auschwitz, including some 700 children, were liberated by the soldiers of the Soviet Army.

1,689 days of murder, pain, suffering, and humiliation were over.
Today, we all remember. We must keep remembering. pic.twitter.com/JZy1KYFXVS

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 27, 2025

Around 7-10,000 were liberated that day. However, Germany had evacuated nearly 60,000 to other camps and murdered many others in a last-ditch desperate attempt to hide their cruelty. It didn’t work, and the world found out. 

In the eyes of so many around the world, the survivors’ very existence is a resounding act of defiance against the world-historic cruelty and vast injustice of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. Their stories of survival are also implicit pleas to the world: Never forget humanity’s capacity to commit unthinkable crimes.

Yes, as much as we want to shy away from considering that people can be truly evil, or that people will ignore the concentration camps right down the street from them because of fear and/or self-loathing, we shouldn’t and must not. Too many young people today have no concept of this evil. They aren’t taught about it, and think it’s a myth. And too many who aren’t are now participating in the antisemitic attacks on college campuses and elsewhere. 

Today, it was the day for the survivors to speak. Just them. No one else. 

Eva Umlauf was only 2 when she and her mother were liberated from the camp — too young to remember the actual day. But the Holocaust is etched onto her skin — A-26,959 tattooed on her left forearm, marking her for life, along with some other Auschwitz survivors.

“You are just a number,” Umlauf, 82, a pediatrician from Munich, told NBC News, explaining how this number will forever make her feel. “But this number is not only on the skin. This is deeper.”

~Snip

“They have to know that it’s true. You know, because it’s so, so unbelievable, unbelievable that nobody can believe this,” she said.

Horrifically unbelievable. Yet this evil DID happen and we MUST face reality.

https://www.youtube.com/live/OiYGZ6AORNc?si=SqwqfmHnOchTuzZ5

If we fail to remember, if we fail to teach about it, it can happen again. We can’t and must not let it. 

Feature Photo Credit: Gate to Auschwitz via iStock, cropped and modified