Auschwitz: How Holocaust survivors are preserving history
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Before we start, I want to warn you that this programme contains details that some people may find distressing. This is Dov Foreman and his great-grandma, Lily Ebert. Hello, TikTok. Shabbat shalom. Shabbat shalom, TikTok. Have a nice weekend. Together, they've shared Lily's story of surviving the Holocaust with over two million followers on TikTok...

But they've also faced a wave of online abuse. We would get positive and then we would get negative. And every day I would wake up, I would read the comments on my phone and there would be thousands of them. Hitler missed one. The Holocaust is fake. We're coming to find you. We're coming to kill you. Lily passed away in October, just months after celebrating her 100th birthday. It was also shortly before the world would mark 80 years since the liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz.

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To help us understand Auschwitz today, let's hear from BBC reporter Jordan Dunbar. You've heard him on the podcast before and he just got back from Auschwitz in Poland where he made a documentary. Hi, Jordan. Hi, Hannah. Jordan, for those who don't know, can you give us a brief history of what happened 80 years ago? What happened at Auschwitz? What happened in the Holocaust and the events that led up to that?

So Auschwitz is the most infamous of the Nazi German concentration or extermination camps. So it was a place where well over a million people were murdered. Now how Auschwitz happened and was allowed to happen is part of the Holocaust. When Adolf Hitler, who's head of the Nazi party, becomes chancellor. So he takes power. And the Nazis had this visceral hatred for the Jewish population.

And as soon as they came into power, they started stripping away rights from people. The right to vote, the right to own businesses, property, synagogues, places of worship were attacked. And as that went on, the Nazis then in the Second World War conquered different parts of Europe, including Poland.

And in occupied Poland, they started building camps for political prisoners. So Polish politicians, artists, doctors, pro-democracy activists, anyone that was trying to stand against the Nazis. And one of these was called Auschwitz. Then Auschwitz grew to take in Soviet prisoners of war. Then it started being a place where the Nazis brought the Jewish population in Poland together.

Previously, Jewish people had been moved to what were called ghettos. So those were parts of towns and cities where the Jewish population were forced, which meant that they were no longer seen by the everyday population. They didn't have their own homes. They'd be good at work in factories helping the war effort, but they weren't paid properly, essentially slavery. And they were kept there before they were taken to so-called concentration camps. But the Auschwitz story and the terrible, terrible end we get to

really starts in 1941. There is a meeting where top Nazis come together and they create what would come to be known as the Final Solution.

The final solution was how to eliminate Europe's Jewish population, which at the time was around 11 million people. And as part of that, they started moving the Jewish population out of countries that they had occupied all across Western and Eastern Europe to these so-called concentration camps where people were put together. They were then taken from these ghettos

put on trains, you're talking men, women and children, and they were sent without knowing where they were going and they would arrive in massive, massive wagons at these camps, including Auschwitz, where they would be taken off and imprisoned or... That is exactly what happened to my family. They were in a ghetto in Hungary and...

and were put on the trains with very, very short notice. One day, SS officers turned up, pack your things, you're leaving. They didn't know where they were going. And they arrived in Auschwitz, and when they arrived there...

My great-grandparents were led straight off to the gas chambers and my grandfather and his siblings went to work in the forced labour camps. And I remember going back there as a teenager and being surprised at the scale. What was it like for you going to Auschwitz, seeing it with your own eyes? So there are two camps next to each other, Birkenau and

It's by far the biggest one. It's difficult to comprehend. The scale is massive. Your 20 football fields, if not more, to your left and right are identical barracks where hundreds of people would have slept in piles of three. So tiny beds, three above each other. And in the middle, just these huge train tracks where every day thousands of people were brought in and separated.

The Holocaust and Auschwitz and these concentration extermination camps, it is cold, meticulous, with years of planning to create this incredibly efficient, what they call death factory. And that's what it feels like when you're there. It is industrial. One of the things about the Holocaust is, so approximately six million Jewish people were murdered. And six million is such a massive number. It's difficult for people to comprehend and to connect to that.

But I was lucky enough to speak to survivors, and that's why for me the documentary was so important. This is Rini Salt, and she was one of the survivors that I interviewed about her experience in Auschwitz. The train slowed down and came to a stop. Immediately we heard dogs barking.

They unlocked the doors, opened them up, and they're screaming and bellowing, get off the train, be quick, get a move on. My father jumped off first, and I jumped after him. When I jumped off, I didn't see him anymore. Without a kiss, without a goodbye, he disappeared right into the air. I never saw him again. Guards were walking around.

And they said, you are here now in Auschwitz-Birkenau. We didn't know what Auschwitz-Birkenau meant. They said, here, they take you straight to the guest chambers. We were so frightened.

is powerful testimony. And yet some people deny that the Holocaust happened at all. Why is it that when we have this historical evidence and these testimonies, that there is so much disinformation and denial? I think the further you get away from a historical event, the more difficult it is to keep alive.

Most people get their information, particularly young people, online, right? Social media, that's where they're picking up their history. UNESCO had a report in 2022, so that's a United Nations body, and that was looking at what was happening with the Holocaust and history, particularly online, because they're worried that this denial and destruction means history will be rewritten and we won't actually keep the facts from the survivors.

alive. In the report they looked at lots of different social media platforms and how the Holocaust came up. Nearly one in five, so 19% of all Holocaust related public Twitter content either denied or distorted the history. Now this is 2022. 17% of TikTok content, 8% of Facebook content was denial or distortion.

And we all know that the algorithms feed you what you click on. So if you don't know anything about this and you're seeing disinformation and you're clicking on it, you're just being fed it. And if that's the only place you get your history, that's how these things get forgotten. Why is it that people are spreading distorted facts, disinformation? What's the agenda behind it? I think for some people, like we say, because it's been 80 years and it's so terrible and difficult to comprehend the sheer number of people murdered,

They don't think it's true and they're spreading it. And, you know, that's misinformation because they're not doing it on purpose. Then there's other people, particularly the far right, who don't believe it happened because they idolise the Nazi party and they don't want to believe that it's happened. That's a reason why the Nazis have been made illegal in so many different countries and you can't support Nazi parties. And most of all, in social media, there's very little regulations. I can just go on there and post what I think is fact.

And if I have a lot of followers, then they're going to think it's fact too. There's very few people stopping me and saying, hold on, where's your evidence? Where are the receipts? You know, where did you get this from? And what UNESCO and the report have said is the way to stop this denial and distortion is through education and particularly digital literacy and critical thinking for young people. And that's the one thing from speaking to the survivors that I really took away was

is when we get our information about these big events, it's really thinking, who is telling me this? Why are they telling me this? Why do they want me to think this way? What more can be done to help?

especially people who won't get a chance to speak to and interview, hear from survivors like both of us have. I mean, you saw Dove and his great-granny Lily keeping her story alive. One of the great things Dove and his great-granny Lily did was they did a kind of an ask me anything on TikTok where people could ask really basic questions without being afraid of being told off for not knowing it. And questions that people think about but were too afraid to ask were

So keeping the stories and experiences, the direct experiences of these survivors, like the ones I've spoken to, alive in whatever form, I think is one of the most important things. What was your biggest takeaway from this process, this journey that you've been on? The thing that surprised me most was the hopeful message I came away with, which is Harry, Eric and Rini, who I interviewed all night,

weren't hateful when they came out. They said having a family was their revenge. And also the fact that they didn't just survive and that they got out with their lives, they also went on to properly live. You know, they made friends, they learned to trust people. Harry says he learned to be human again. And then they had families, they fell in love, which after everything they've been through is absolutely incredible. And to me is just such a massive sign of strength.

And of course, that's my family story. That's what happened in my family as well. My grandfather went on, found love, had a huge family and here we are today. So thank you for telling us this story and telling me about your experience of it. Thanks for having me here.

You heard from Jordan how misinformation, distorted facts and denial of the Holocaust is spread online. But how do you approach conversations where false information is shared and what can be done to stop it spreading? We reached out to Andy Pearce. He's an associate professor and historian at University College London's Centre for Holocaust Education. This is a complicated question for several reasons. Firstly, context is important. It matters where you're having these conversations.

The where matters because it shapes how you can respond and what you may or may not be able to say or do. Secondly, whilst there can be crossover between false information and Holocaust denial, these are not necessarily one and the same. Someone could be sharing false information without knowing it to be false or incorrect. That's less likely in the case of Holocaust denial because denial of the Holocaust invariably is driven by ideology, beliefs and or political objectives.

A critical first step for these kind of conversations then is to listen closely to what the person's actually saying. This will allow you to gauge whether what they're saying relates to what they think are facts or to understandings or maybe both. From here you can make an informed judgment about whether they know, that is whether they're conscious that what they're saying is incorrect. And then you need to try and determine why they're sharing this information or making these claims.

That might be easier if you know the individual, though that said, it can be tricky for you to judge in those sorts of situations. If the person is saying these things with malicious intent, then it's unlikely you're going to be able to change that person's mind. If instead it comes from ignorance, then there's a greater chance that you could potentially steer them towards correcting their own mistakes and learning more about the facts and what actually took place.

Depending on where the conversation is happening, that's also going to impact what you might be able to do about it. If the person is making clearly anti-Semitic remarks and actively engaging in hate speech, then there are reporting mechanisms you can turn to. Fundamentally, the best way to be able to identify and respond to these kind of conversations is to be confident in your own knowledge and understanding.

You don't necessarily need to know everything there is to know about the Holocaust. Few people do. But exercise good practice. Don't rely on social media or unverified websites for your history. Instead, consult reputable organisations, individuals, institutions and historical works.

If you want to find out more about the Holocaust and Auschwitz, you can watch Jordan's documentary. It's called What Happened at Auschwitz. And there are also loads of articles and interviews with survivors about their experiences on the BBC website. That is it for today's episode. Thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. And we'll be back with another episode soon. See you then. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

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