In one of dozens of Holocaust Remembrance Day events, one survivor described her experience surviving a gas chamber at 13 years old because it malfunctioned.
Baerbal Bas, the speaker of Germany's federal parliament, said Thursday that the pandemic acted"like an accelerant" for antisemitism in her country and across the globe. Bas was one of many politicians worldwide condemning the rise in antisemitism during Thursday's events commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"Antisemitism is here — it isn't just on the extreme fringe, not just among the eternally incorrigible and a few antisemitic trolls on the net," Bas said in Bundestag, the German parliament, according to the AP."It is a problem of our society — all of society." German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Mickey Levy, Speaker of the Knesset, Bärbel Bas, President of the Bundestag, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Bodo Ramelow, Prime Minister of Thuringia and President of the Bundesrat, from left, stand in front of the Reichstag building after the memorial hour for the"Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism" at the lettering"#WeRemember" in Berlin, Germany, on Thursday.
Birenbaum, now a poet, said she was 10 when Poland was invaded by Nazis in 1939, and 13 when she survived a trip to the gas chamber at the Majdanek camp because it malfunctioned, and she was later sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the AP reported.