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.
