Eighty years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and uncovered unimaginable horrors. For the 7,000 prisoners remaining—more than 60,000 had been forced to undertake a death march in the weeks before Allied troops arrived—liberation came as a bitter relief, overshadowed by the harrowing murder of 1.1 million within those gates. This number included 1 million Jews, along with tens of thousands of Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, and others deemed “undesirable” by the Third Reich.
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Since then, Auschwitz has become the foremost symbol of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Yet the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation reminds the world that the scars of genocide, though deep, are slowly being obscured by time. That creates risks: the Holocaust didn’t begin with mass murder. The dehumanization of Jews progressed gradually from public exclusion to eventual internment to finally extermination. Millions of regular Germans—and Europeans more broadly—facilitated or silently accepted these actions.
As Holocaust survivor Marian Turski warned five years ago at Auschwitz, this sort of indifference in the face of discrimination risks people not even noticing when “an Auschwitz-like catastrophe suddenly befalls you and your descendants.”
The time for Holocaust survivors like Turski, most of whom are now in their 90s, to share their warning is growing short. And as the memories of the atrocity fade, the world is witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism, along with other xenophobia, and distortions of history. Members of Germany’s AfD actively engage in Holocaust distortion and denial. Their ideological far-right brethren in Austria may soon form a new government for the first time since World War II. In Italy, which also has a right-wing prime minister in Giorgia Meloni, neofascists openly give fascist salutes in public.
In this climate, remembering the Holocaust in its full complexity becomes a moral and political imperative.
Auschwitz was initially a site for Polish political prisoners. But it quickly became a key instrument of Nazi extermination policies. By 1942, it was central to the implementation of the Nazi regime’s Endlösung der Judenfrage (“Final Solution to the Jewish Question”).
Auschwitz consisted of three separate camps: Auschwitz I, built on former military barracks, housed the infamous Block 10, where Nazi scientists conducted barbaric medical experiments. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, spread across 346 acres (140 hectares) in the nearby village of Brzezinka, became the site of mass extermination, its gas chambers claiming the lives of more than a million victims. Auschwitz III (Monowice) was a hub of forced labor for industrial giants like I.G. Farben, which profited from human misery, even producing Zyklon B, the gas used to murder inmates.
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The camp also encompassed adjacent former Polish villages, designated as “zones of interest,” which were cleared of their inhabitants and used to support the operations of Auschwitz. These areas included barracks for guards, factories for forced labor, and agricultural sites meant to sustain the camp’s population and the Nazi war effort.
The images from liberated camps shocked people around the world, as did survivor testimonies, and the evidence of mass murder revealed by postwar trials.
Faced with the scale of this catastrophe, the world struggled to memorialize the Holocaust. Survivors, Jewish organizations, and national governments played critical roles in shaping early remembrance efforts. Some focused on preserving Jewish culture in the face of near-extinction, while others sought to mark sites of atrocity.
One such effort was led by Holocaust survivor, poet, and writer Abraham Sutzkever, who dedicated himself to preserving Yiddish language and culture. As part of the “Paper Brigade,” which he formed alongside fellow poet Szmerke Kaczerginski, Sutzkever rescued literary documents from the Jewish community of Vilna, Poland, where he had been imprisoned in the ghetto. After the war, these archives were donated to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where they remain accessible today.
Yet Sutzkever’s efforts were not limited to preserving the past. In defiance of the near destruction of Jewish life in Europe, as well as continued anti-Jewish prejudice and violence, he dedicated himself to ensuring its continuity. His literary magazine, Di Goldene Keyt (“The Golden Chain”), became a symbol of resilience, safeguarding Jewish history and identity for future generations.
Sutzkever’s push was only one of the many efforts to cast this horrific memory in stone.
Memorializing Auschwitz itself was fraught with challenges. In 1947, the first exhibition chronicling the lives of the death camp’s inmates opened on the grounds of Auschwitz I. A decade later, in January 1957, the International Auschwitz Committee, an association of camp’s survivors and their organizations, launched a competition to design a monument at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, meant to serve as a stark warning to future generations. The debate surrounding this monument revealed a deeper tension: how to properly commemorate mass murder.
Traditional monuments seemed inadequate for capturing the scale and nature of the Holocaust’s horrors. Polish architect Oskar Hansen proposed a radical approach—a geometric pathway winding through the camp, leading visitors to the crematoria, while allowing the surrounding areas to be overtaken by nature. This was meant to symbolize both the cycle of rebirth and the inevitable erosion of memory. However, officials ultimately rejected his vision. Instead, the International Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau was completed in 1967, featuring abstract sculptures and multilingual inscriptions emphasizing the camp’s global significance.
Yet Auschwitz, despite its profound symbolism, was just one of countless sites where the Holocaust unfolded. Some, like the extermination camps at Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka (all in Poland), were widely known and gradually marked. But many killing sites remained neglected—unmarked forests, bogs, and fields where Jews were rounded up, stripped, and executed in what historians now call the “Holocaust by bullets.” These sites, scattered across Eastern Europe, challenged narratives that isolated Nazi crimes to a few infamous locations. Remembering them was critical because they forced people to confront the widespread complicity of ordinary citizens and the logistical scale of the genocide.
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The effort to document and commemorate these lesser-known sites, however, has been slow and inconsistent. Stalled throughout the communist era, it gained momentum after the collapse of the communist government in Poland in 1989. Since then, in Poland alone, many individuals, institutions, and grassroots organizations have undertaken efforts to confront the complex histories of the Holocaust and the role played by Poles. Scholarly institutions, such as the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, have spearheaded these efforts. Over the past decade, during which the authoritarian Law and Justice party has ruled in Poland, the Centre has served as a staunch defender of independent research. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in 2014, has complemented the center’s academic achievements with its focus on popularizing historical knowledge.
Smaller organizations and people working outside of major metropolitan centers are engaged in equally important efforts to confront the troubling histories of the Holocaust where they occurred. The work of organizations like the Forgotten Foundation, in collaboration with the Warsaw-based Rabbinical Commission, has been crucial in identifying and preserving unmarked burial sites. Scholars such as Caroline Sturdy Colls have pioneered non-invasive archaeological methods to locate mass graves, including one in Adampol, Poland, where a memorial site has now been erected. The Brama Cukermana Foundation has similarly worked to preserve the legacy of ghetto fighters in Będzin, Poland, successfully lobbying for the creation of a local museum. Similar efforts exist elsewhere throughout Europe.
The challenge of Holocaust memory extends beyond sites of murder to the places where Jews sought refuge. My own research has focused on identifying and marking these spaces of survival. One such project, Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, examined nine hiding places used by Jews during the war.
Among them was a shelter in a Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The hideout was built by enlarging and bricking up a grave pit, creating a roughly square space that could fit several people standing. The ceiling was formed from Jewish tombstones (matzevot) laid across tram rails. This refuge provided temporary shelter until it was discovered in 1942. Of those who sought safety there, only two teenage boys, Abraham Carmi (formerly Abraham Stolbach) and Dawid “Jurek” Płoński, survived the war. Today, the site still awaits proper commemoration.
As we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must recognize that Holocaust memory is neither singular nor static. It is a fragmented history, spread across Europe, shaped by countless stories of survival and loss. The massive extermination camps force us to acknowledge the industrial scale of genocide, while smaller, more obscure memorials remind us how deeply the Holocaust infiltrated everyday life. Forgetting these sites—whether through neglect or intentional erasure—risks distorting our understanding of the past.
Memorializing the Holocaust on a broad scale is crucial to reaching new audiences, ensuring that people worldwide remember the many actions by everyday people that built toward mass extermination — as well as addressing contemporary threats to historical truth. Doing so does not simply honor the past, it safeguards the future.
Natalia Romik is a public historian, architect and artist whose work focuses on Jewish memory and commemoration of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Ukraine.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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