Among those she saved from deportation to Auschwitz was her own family.

Those two statements were from the Ambassadors of Poland and Germany, who spoke on the occasion of the liberation of Auschwitz camp.

In April 1944, Barbie ordered the deportation to Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu.

She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old, and her brother was eight, and the parents were lost.

What he doesn t understand is that the memory of Auschwitz is also the memory of the Battle of Britain, the bombing of Dresden, the occupation of Paris, and the Warsaw uprising.

British forces liberated Bergen Belsen and Neuengamme, while Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in Poland and the Sachsenhausen and Ravensburg camps in Germany.

And she told me this, she said, We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing.

Auschwitz did not occur in a vacuum. It was the furthest extreme of a disaster that incorporated all these other events.

It is a hatred that did not disappear with Nazism, and that one can still, 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, glimpse in terrifying manifestations.

A few months ago, I participated in the March of the Living at Auschwitz. Many Jews with European roots who now live in America or Israel were in attendance.

Mindful of Ypres, Warsaw, or Stalingrad, not to mention Auschwitz and Treblinka, many regard this as a good thing.

Thus, Auschwitz is dismissed as a detail of history, in the telling phrase of the French politician Jean Marie Le Pen.

Netanyahu s own insistence on ironclad security arrangements is a euphemism for an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley and no return to the Auschwitz borders of 1967.

So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people.

Contrary to what the Nobel Prize winning author José Saramago once said, the Israeli army s attacks in Gaza are not comparable in any way to Auschwitz.

She told me this. She said, I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say.

For, if it were true, any and all measures taken against Muslims, however brutal, would be justified, and Israel would indeed be a frontline state, resisting Islamofacism to prevent another Auschwitz.

A few months ago, I participated in the March of the Living at Auschwitz. Many Jews with European roots who now live in America or Israel were in attendance.

But Germany also appears to be increasingly uneasy about having to continue supporting Israel even when its policies are clearly reproachable. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, can the bilateral relationship withstand the rising tide of anti Israel sentiment in Europe?

Of course, Germany s eagerness to discharge the burden of history is not new. Back in 1998, the renowned intellectual Martin Walser publicly attacked the pervasiveness of Auschwitz in Germany s remembrance culture, declaring that the Holocaust had become a moral cudgel with which to intimidate all Germans and keep them in a perpetual state of guilt.

And they shelved the project. And it sat there for 10 years, and then one day Abe Spiegel from Los Angeles, who had lost his three year old son at Auschwitz, came, saw the model, wrote the check and it got built 10 years later.