For survivors of the Holocaust, 8 May brought the certainty that those who had humiliated them and their families for many years, persecuted them and deported them to concentration and extermination camps, had now finally been defeated and deprived of power.

At the same time, however, on 8 May 1945 they were confronted with the cruel reality of how many of their relatives had been murdered and burned in the camps. So most of them were completely alone on that 8 May, and yet they celebrated with the liberated peoples of Europe the end of that inhuman and murderous system designed in Germany that had engulfed Europe and torn it apart with war, terror and suffering.

Commenting in Berlin, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, stated:

“The main sentiment that united people on 8 May 1945 was joy that the war was over and that the liberators of Europe had finally consigned the Nazis and their anti-Semitic and racist ideology to the scrap heap of history. In view of the appalling suffering they had endured in the camps, the survivors of the Holocaust thought it unimaginable that anti-Semitism would ever be able to rear its head again anywhere − and especially not in Germany.

It only took a few years for the survivors to learn differently. Since then, all survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants have recognised that their liberation is not a guaranteed permanent state, but a process that is always under threat and needs to be constantly shaped and won anew. The last word has not yet been spoken.”