POLITICS AND POETICS

THE SILENCE OF THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY: HOW AUSCHWITZ BECAME AN INCONVENIENT MEMORY

MELANIE FELDMAN

March 10, 2025

January 27, 2025, marked eighty years precisely since the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps and the one that, for many, emblematizes the Holocaust. But the anniversary, which until recently merited headlines commanding global attention and solemn reflection every five years, this time somehow barely rated a footnote.

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In 2020, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation was a global event. World leaders gathered at Auschwitz and Yad Vashem, speeches were made, and survivors were honored. That moment still bore the weight of living history, and the presence of the last remaining witnesses underscored the urgency of remembrance. But in 2025, the chilling milestone barely registered. Auschwitz, it seems, has finally begun to fade—both as a historical event and as a public ritual.

This conspicuous absence of commemoration prompts critical questions: Has the collective memory of Auschwitz become too burdensome, too politically charged, or simply too far in the past for today’s world, burdened as it is by so many newly urgent social crises and political upheavals? Has remembrance become too heavy to carry, or just too passé? When history fades into the background, what else quietly disappears?

For decades, “Never Forget” served as a societal vow to remember the atrocities of the Holocaust so as to prevent their recurrence. But as the last survivors pass away and firsthand testimonies give way to historical documentation, the immediacy fades. And in an era dominated by rapid news cycles and digital distractions, the profound lessons of the past struggle to compete for public attention. The digital era has fundamentally altered the way we engage with history. The immediacy of online content, algorithm-driven news cycles, and the rise of misinformation contribute to a collective forgetting. Auschwitz, once a defining symbol of twentieth-century history, is overshadowed in a world where history is increasingly consumed in bite-sized, decontextualized, sometimes outright-false fragments.

Yishai Jusidman, View of Mauthausen, 2012. Acrylic on wood, 32 1/2 x 43 1/2 in.

The decline of international institutions such as the United Nations and the erosion of multilateral cooperation have also contributed to the lack of coordinated commemorative efforts. As nations retreat into nationalist and isolationist policies, the responsibility of collective historical memory has diminished. Furthermore, economic crises, inflation, climate disasters, and political instability have shifted public and governmental priorities. Commemorating the Holocaust requires a sense of stability and a political environment conducive to long-term global reflection.

Of course, there’s another reason why the eightieth anniversary passed with so little fanfare: Auschwitz is no longer so easy to talk about.

Consider the political context of 2025: The war in Gaza has turned every discussion of atrocities into a minefield. Accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and historical parallels abound, to the point where even invoking Auschwitz invites immediate controversy. Who gets to use the Holocaust as an argument? Who is allowed to claim moral authority from it? The risk of politicization is so high that perhaps the most straightforward course of action is simply to commemorate it as little as possible.

Yishai Jusidman, Dachau, 2012. Acrylic on wood, 32 1/2 x 43 1/2 in.

The Holocaust has always been an area of dispute for historical (re)interpretation, but in 2025, it is a battleground for real-time political warfare. The lesson of Auschwitz—if it can even be said to have a singular lesson—was supposed to be that societies must guard against the slow creep of authoritarianism, the demonization of minorities, and the normalization of political violence. And yet those very forces are alive and well today. The Holocaust has been appropriated into political discourse, often manipulated to serve divergent agendas. This politicization dilutes its historical gravity, transforming a universal cautionary tale into a contentious symbol wielded in ideological battles. And inevitably, as the complexities of its memory have become entangled with contemporary political narratives, public engagement with Auschwitz’s legacy has diminished.

Resurgent far-right ideologies, exemplified by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, challenge the very foundations of postwar European identity. The AfD’s growing influence, marked by rhetoric that trivializes Nazi crimes, raises uncomfortable questions about the efficacy of historical education and the resilience of democratic values. Indeed, historical revisionism has gained traction. Some politicians and commentators openly downplay or distort the history of the Holocaust, reframing it to fit nationalistic narratives. The failure to meaningfully commemorate the eightieth anniversary may reflect a broader shift in which societies no longer feel an obligation to confront these distortions.

In the United States, political figures like vice president J. D. Vance have sparked controversy by engaging with European far-right leaders and criticizing established democratic safeguards. At the February 2025 Munich Security Conference, held ironically in the city where the Nazi movement gained momentum, Vance met with AfD leader Alice Weidel and criticized Germany’s political “firewall” that excludes extremist parties from governance, suggesting that such measures undermine democratic inclusivity. Vance’s stance—that all voices, including extremist ones, deserve a platform—ignores the historical lessons of how democracies can be subverted from within.

Yishai Jusidman, Auschwitz, 2011. Acrylic on wood, 42 1/2 x 32 in.

There is an argument to be made that the extensive focus on the Holocaust in education, film, and media over the past decades has led to a form of “fatigue” where audiences, particularly younger generations, feel desensitized to its significance. It is also true that while the Holocaust is central to European memory, it has never occupied the same position globally. In some parts of the world, it is viewed as a European atrocity with limited relevance to local histories. This raises questions about how universal its lessons truly are, and whether the decline in commemoration reflects a broader reconfiguration of historical memory in a multipolar world. “Never Again” has failed to stick, given the genocide and ethnic violence that persist in various parts of the globe. From Xinjiang to Ukraine to Gaza, mass violence continues, often thanks to international inaction, or even complicity.

The fact that Auschwitz is not entirely forgotten is evident in the number of recently released films and books that continue to generate both interest and controversy. Many of these works, however, do not necessarily expand the broader discourse of remembrance. Instead, they reinforce existing arguments about memory, trauma, and the moral responsibilities of history. Some use the Holocaust merely as a backdrop to tell other stories removed from the actual tragedy. This shift marks a broader change in how the Shoah is represented in contemporary culture. Once, Holocaust narratives were primarily constructed around testimony, moral reckoning, and the imperative of remembrance. Now, in an era where actual survivors are gone and the event itself is becoming historical rather than lived memory, new works seem less concerned with bearing witness than with using the Holocaust as a setting, a mood, or even a form of aesthetic provocation.

Yishai Jusidman, Door, 2011. Acrylic on wood, 36 x 26 in.

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest (2023) offers a chilling meditation on the banality of evil by depicting the daily lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family. Its detached, almost mundane portrayal of the perpetrators—living in quiet domesticity beside an infernal abyss—forces us to confront the psychological mechanisms that enable mass atrocity. By stripping away traditional dramatic cues and moral signposting, Glazer presents the horror not as an external spectacle but as something disturbingly woven into the fabric of ordinary existence. The Zone of Interest is an anti-didactic film—it refuses to guide us toward a comfortable moral conclusion, and instead leaves us alone to weigh the implications of what we have witnessed.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024) explores Jewish identity and generational trauma through the lens of two cousins traveling to Poland to confront their family’s Holocaust history. The film underscores the paradox of contemporary Holocaust memory: a mix of reverence and fatigue, and an often uneasy search for personal meaning in a history that, for many, feels increasingly distant. Unlike earlier films that confronted the Shoah with solemnity, Eisenberg’s approach leans into irony and generational neurosis, reflecting a shift in which Holocaust memory is not necessarily about moral clarity, but about grappling with its increasingly fragmented cultural presence.

Perhaps a rare exception to this trend is Ruth Wertheim’s memoir A Life After Auschwitz (2024), which personalizes the aftermath of survival, detailing the lifelong impact of the Holocaust beyond the moment of liberation. Wertheim’s struggle to reconcile her past with her present mirrors the global difficulty in grappling with Auschwitz’s legacy today. The book highlights how remembrance is not just about preserving historical events, but also about understanding the enduring psychological and societal scars left in their wake. Unlike the growing body of works where the Shoah is present but largely unexplored, a background rather than the central subject, Wertheim deals directly with its moral and personal implications.

Yishai Jusidman, Majdanek, 2010. Acrylic on wood, 33 x 41 in.

The broader trend, however, raises questions about how historical memory functions in an era when lived experience is giving way to mediated representation. If earlier works were driven by the imperative of “Never Forget,” today’s works suggest an uneasy reality: Remembering is not the same as understanding, and presence is not the same as meaning. If the Holocaust was once an untouchable moral lesson, today it risks becoming a symbol emptied of meaning through repetition. For those of us who inherited this history not through direct experience but through family memory, the shift is disorienting. How do we hold on to something that is still shaping us but is increasingly slipping into abstraction?

The muted observance of Auschwitz’s eightieth anniversary signifies more than a mere lapse in historical acknowledgment; it reflects a deeper societal discomfort with confronting the persistence of hate and intolerance. Remembering Auschwitz should be not simply a passive act of commemoration but an active commitment to defending human dignity and democratic integrity. At a time when political leaders debate whether to exclude extremist voices and far-right parties gain traction across the globe, the lessons of the Holocaust demand vigilance and moral clarity. The relative silence surrounding this anniversary serves as a stark reminder that we forget the past at our peril—a peril that threatens both our present and our future.

The paintings in this post are from Yishai Jusidman’s “Prussian Blue” series, a collection of approximately fifty paintings created between 2010 and 2016. This body of work depicts concentration-camp-related imagery primarily using Prussian blue, which references both its presence in gas chamber walls (due to chemical reactions with Zyklon B) and its use in traditional European painting. Some aspects of the camp interiors have been reconstructed based on forensic evidence, as the Nazis destroyed what they could before Allied forces liberated the camps.

Melanie Feldman (born 1987, Hollywood, Florida) is a writer and scholar who explores how history refuses to stay in the past. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University and now lives in Tel Aviv, where she writes about all the strange ways we remember trauma. Her work has appeared in “The Kraków Review of Books,” “The Diaspora Journal,” and “Ma’arav,” an independent left-leaning Israeli newspaper.

Cover image: Yishai Jusidman, A Forest near Sobibor, 2016. Acrylic on wood, 32 1/2 x 43 1/2 in.