Holocaust survivors, leaders, and citizens around the globe paused Tuesday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the 6 million Jews and millions of others killed by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The observances coincided with fresh controversy in the United States, where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz drew sharp criticism for likening a federal immigration enforcement operation to the plight of Anne Frank.
The annual commemoration falls on January 27, the date in 1945 when Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the deadliest Nazi camp in occupied Poland. The U.N. General Assembly designated the day in 2005 to remember the genocide.
At the Auschwitz site, former prisoners placed flowers and wreaths at an execution wall where thousands died. Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki was set to attend a ceremony at nearby Birkenau, where gas chambers claimed countless lives, mostly Jews transported from across Europe.
In Berlin, candles flickered, and white roses adorned the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a sprawling field of 2,700 concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate symbolizing Germany’s atonement for the slaughter of 6 million Jews.
A candlelight march was planned in the Czech Republic at Terezin, the former Theresienstadt camp, where thousands of Jews perished or were deported to extermination sites like Auschwitz.
Nazi forces murdered about 1.1 million people at Auschwitz alone, including Jews, Poles, Roma, and others. Across Europe, Jews were killed in ghettos, camps, or executed in fields and forests.
Israel, with the largest survivor population, observes its own Holocaust remembrance on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary in April, highlighting Jewish resistance.
In Prague, survivors gathered at the Czech Parliament’s upper house. Pavel Jelinek, 90, from Liberec — once home to 1,350 Jews — said he is the last of 37 who returned postwar.
Globally, 196,600 Jewish survivors remain, down from 220,000 last year, per the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Their median age is 87, and 97% were born in 1928 or later.
Some survivors shared testimonies anew. In London, 95-year-old Mala Tribich addressed Britain’s Cabinet, a first, per Prime Minister Keir Starmer. She recounted Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, shattering her childhood in Piotrków Trybunalski, forced labor at 12 in the first ghetto, and losses of her mother, father, and sister to the Nazis. Sent to Ravensbrück then Bergen-Belsen, she was freed by British troops in April 1945, the Associated Press reported.
Tribich implored fighting antisemitism: “Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses left. That is why I ask you today not just to listen, but to become my witness.”
Leaders linked the past to present threats. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned of rising antisemitism and AI distorting history, blurring “fact and fiction,” per AP.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, amid Russia’s four-year invasion, urged unity like that defeating Nazis: “Whenever hatred and war threaten nations, unity that saves lives is needed,” AP reported.
In Washington, the White House issued a message from President Donald Trump on the 81st anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. It honored Jewish victims and others — Slavs, Roma, disabled people, religious leaders, those targeted for sexual orientation, political prisoners — vowing freedom over evil.
The statement described Auschwitz’s horrors: prisoners stripped of dignity, subjected to murder, labor, starvation, disease, torture, and experiments. It pledged never to allow such evil in the West, highlighting the administration’s anti-antisemitism efforts and support for Jewish Americans’ religious freedom.
The message remembered the perished and commended survivors’ resilience: “We honor their enduring resilience, faith, and strength—and we recommit to the sacred truth that every human being is made in the holy image of God.”
Walz’s Anne Frank Gaffe: “dangerous, disgusting, and profoundly irresponsible”
Yet the day was overshadowed by backlash against Walz, a Democrat, who on Sunday compared Trump’s immigration surge in Minneapolis to Anne Frank’s hiding during Nazi occupation.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said at a press conference, the New York Post reported. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Frank, a Jewish teen, chronicled two years in hiding before capture and death in a camp. Her diary exposed Nazism’s evils.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum posted on Monday: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun called Walz’s remarks “historically illiterate and antisemitic,” saying they “cheapen the horror.”
Minnesota GOP Chair Alex Plechash deemed them “offensive, historically indefensible, and morally reckless,” trivializing the murder of 6 million Jews. He noted Walz’s pattern, including past “Gestapo” references to police, and urged Sen. Amy Klobuchar, eyeing governor, to disavow.
Republican congressional candidate John Nagel told Fox News Digital the comparison was “dangerous, disgusting, and profoundly irresponsible,” creating peril by portraying agents as Nazis.
