Forum: Why Auschwitz, other atrocities must stay seared into memory
Published 1:30 am Saturday, February 14, 2026
By Cassie Davis / Herald Forum
It was the summer of 1944 and Adolf Hitler’s operations were running at full speed and his demented plan seemed to be going much more smoothly than the Nazis hoped … until it didn’t!
All throughout the world, the words Auschwitz, Hitler, death camps, Soviet and Churchill would be burned into the DNA of not just the survivors and fighters of WWII, but the younger generations as well in hopes of never letting such a thing happen again.
Three months before the Soviets found the atrocious Auschwitz death camp in 1944, Heinrich Himmler, a leading Nazi official who was part of Hitler’s extermination plan in WWII, played the move of halting the use of gas chambers and called for their destruction. Unfortunately for Himmler, the destruction was only partway completed.
On Jan. 27, 1945, as the Soviets were advancing toward the Polish town of Osweicim, they stumbled upon the most inhumane, unthinkable conditions that no human should ever have to be put through. Around 230 Red Army men were killed, as the Nazis knew right where they were heading.
Eva Schloss, a 10-year-old girl at the time, remembers staying behind in hopes of her mother escaping the hospital barracks. Schloss remembers the astonishment of seeing the first Red Army soldier. She showed him to the barracks, but he simply stood there in contempt for a minute, taking in everything around him. He observed the environment and the living conditions and tears fell down his face as he thought to himself, “What crime did these people commit?”
The liberation of Auschwitz was the beginning of the end for a sociopathic regime that had hoped to take over the world. My hope for the reader is not to be disturbed but rather to be aware of the dangerous and lifelong psychological effects of what a tragedy (the Holocaust in particular) can do to just one human being. The younger generations will never be able to comprehend and hopefully will never have to.
In the words of the late, great Rod Serling: “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the grave diggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God’s earth.”
Cassie Davis lives in Arlington.
