International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On this date, Jan. 27, in 1945, the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by U.S.-allied Soviet troops.

Like many Jews, I prefer not to call it a “concentration camp,” for that is what the German Nazis called the hellish places where they confined the people they sought to exterminate — 1.1 million in all in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. Of those killed at Auschwitz, a million were Jews. Numbers matter and should be stated aloud.

Think of it this way: At Auschwitz-Birkenau, in a space of just under 500 acres, in less than 18 months, Jews numbering more than the entire population of San Francisco were gassed, shot, beaten, bludgeoned, starved, dehydrated, tortured, sickened or frozen to death. In all, the Nazis murdered 6,000,000 Jews: two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe, one-third of the entire Jewish population in the world.

It’s no wonder that the day of the camp’s liberation is now called Holocaust Remembrance Day, so declared by the United Nations (so rarely today a friend of the Jewish people) in a 2005 resolution. In the words of Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, “for the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

As I sat down in my study in Florida to compose this piece, I read breaking news from New York — the city with the most Jews in the world outside Israel, a city so synonymous with American Jewishness that it came as a severe shock to Jews around the world when its voters recently elected as mayor a man who believes we should “Globalize the intifada.”

In the context of the enormities of Auschwitz, the day’s news from New York might seem small fare. A playground in Borough Park, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn — therefore, of course, a playground used largely by little Jewish boys and girls — had been vandalized by two teenagers. Playground equipment and a handball court were covered in more than 50 swastikas. The walls of the handball court had the words “Adolf Hitler” daubed on them. No one was killed, unlike the attacks last month at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, but that is not the point. In a public place in Jewish Brooklyn, symbols and words of hate were meant to evoke and sneer at the killing of Jews.

As Piotr Cywinski, the sage Polish historian who is the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, wrote in his book “Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human” (2023), the camps were a place of “programmatic dehumanization.” Gazing at pictures of a vandalized playground in Brooklyn, I can’t help feeling that the project to dehumanize Jews lives on, ineradicable, in spite of all our efforts to teach people right from wrong, good from evil. Knowledge of the Holocaust — taught to generations of Americans at schools across this country and elsewhere — no longer seems to ensure that antisemitism is anathema in our society.

We can be forgiven for despairing, especially when antisemitic outrages (let us not call them “incidents”) occur almost every day in various parts of the United States and the Western Judeo-Christian world. Heartbreaking, for all of us, was the fire that tore through Beth Israel, the oldest and largest synagogue in the state of Mississippi — and the only synagogue in the city of Jackson — the evil work of a 19-year-old arsonist with a hatred for Jews. (And once again, a teenager.)

What should we do to fight antisemitism to extinction? It would be so easy to give in to despair and to adopt, instead, a defensive crouch. But we will not do that. Adamantly not. Never Again. America is home to the Jews. We thrive here and play our indispensable part in ensuring that America thrives.

Didn’t George Washington say this, in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah, Georgia, on June 14, 1790? “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven.”

As an American Jew with zero-tolerance for antisemitism, I have made it my mission to fight back against antisemitism by helping to strengthen the hand of those who expose Jew-hatred in our midst and act to curtail it. To this end, I have helped a nonprofit that has been fighting extremism since 2014, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), pay for the purchase of the house at Auschwitz that was once occupied by Rudolf Hoss, the camp’s murderous commandant. This was the house featured, in fact, in “The Zone of Interest,” a film about the seemingly idyllic life Hoss led with his family in the shadow of a death camp.

The project has turned that tainted place of horror into its newest initiative, the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER). They call it ARCHER at House 88, that being the street number of the address. Mark Wallace, a former U.S. diplomat who heads the project, oversees a dedicated team of researchers who have set up a global database of “extremist content, groups, actors and incidents,” powered by the very latest technology. This database and numerous other government advisory groups that CEP/ARCHER is associated with all work to diminish the power of those who wish to spread antisemitism to our young people.

These efforts enable CEP/ARCHER to persuade Western lawmakers to crack down on antisemitic and terrorist support networks, extinguish online propaganda, recruitment, incitement and disrupt their financial networks. The goal of CEP/ARCHER is to investigate, expose and act to stop evil.

I first visited the house on Jan. 27, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On that occasion, I heard an Italian music historian play the piano in what used to be Hoss’s living room. He played a lullaby that had been composed by one of the prisoners at Auschwitz, and as I heard the music I was filled with powerful hope. If we can reclaim the house in which a planner of the extermination of Jews once lived and turn it into a center that works to fight against everything he stood for, we have to believe that we can combat antisemitism in the world at large.

Our greatest enemy used to be complacency. It is now despair. We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to either. We owe that to the men, women and children who perished at Auschwitz. And we owe it to the men, women and children of today who need to live without fear of hatred, dehumanization, destruction of their property and, worse, violence and death.

About the author

Elliott Broidy is chairman and CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings and a co-chairman of the Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism and Hate.