Senate Resolution 35 -- Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz Extermination Camp in Nazi-Occupied Poland

Floor Speech

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Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I wish to take this opportunity to bring
to my Senate colleagues' attention the most momentous day that will
occur next week.

Next week, on January 27, it will be the 70th anniversary of the
liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp--70 years since the
liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was a triumph for
the allies, but a melancholy day as the world began to see the films
and photographs coming out of this hellhole.

I stand here today to remember and remind us all that, more than any
other word, Auschwitz is synonymous with evil.

As someone who is very proud of her Polish-American heritage, I
visited Auschwitz. I wanted to see it when I had the chance to learn
more about my own heritage, and I wanted to see what happened there so
that I would remember. I rise today so that the world remembers what
happened there, and then the heroic effort of the allied forces, joined
together, to be able to save Europe and save Western civilization.

I have submitted a resolution honoring those who survive even today,
and those who were lost, that would remind us that we need to work
always for tolerance, peace, and justice, and, always, to end genocide.

The harms of Auschwitz are incomprehensible and indescribable. The
numbers are grim and even ghoulish. Over 1 million people--men, women,
and children--lost their lives at Auschwitz. Ninety percent were Jews,
hundreds of thousands were children, and it was the largest of any of
the death camps.

Auschwitz was first created as an internment camp for Polish
dissidents, for hundreds of thousands of Poles who were not Jewish but
were murdered alongside the Jews of Auschwitz.

In occupied Poland, a Nazi governor named Hans Frank proclaimed that,
``Poles will become slaves of the Third Reich.''

But Auschwitz went far beyond the Poles, because the German
authorities brought in people from throughout Europe. Who were the
people who came? They were teachers, they were politicians, they were
professors, they were artists--they were even Catholic priests. They
were executed or barely survived. These are the stories of heroism that
arise from the horrors.

Many Poles risked their lives to save Jews. I am reminded of the
story of Irena Sendler, who was a young social worker in Warsaw. She
smuggled 200 Jewish children out of the ghetto into a safe house. The
Gestapo arrested her in 1943. They first tortured her and then
condemned her to death.

Jan Karski, working for the Polish Government, went on to be a leader
of solidarity in the founding of the new Polish democratic government.
In working, he visited the Warsaw ghetto and did much to liberate
people.

But this is not a story of numbers or statistics or naming of heroes.
It is a story I am going to tell about myself.

In the late 1970s, as a brandnew Congresswoman, I traveled to Poland.
I wanted to see my heritage, and I visited the small--really small--
village that my family came from, where my great-grandmother left
Poland as a 16-year-old girl to come to the United States to meet up
with her brother and begin a new life, with little money in her pocket
but big dreams in her heart. The story of America is the story of our
family. Landing in Baltimore when women didn't even have the right to
vote, she came in 1886--exactly 100 years to the year I became a U.S.
Senator. So I wanted to go back to see where we came from to really
know our story even better. But I also wanted to see the dark side of
the history of Poland, and I went to Auschwitz.

Touring the concentration camp was an experience for me that was
searing. Even today I carry it not only in my mind's eye, but I carry
it in my heart. I could not believe the experience. The Presiding
Officer knows me. I am a fairly strong, resilient person. I think we
have even shared stories that I was a child abuse worker. I have seen
tough things. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw that day.

As I walked through the gate of Auschwitz, to see the sign--that
despicable sign--of welcome there. And then we toured--well, you don't
tour. It is not a tourist site, it is a memorial. It is sacred ground.
It is not a tourist site. But as we walked through, we saw the chambers
where people had died.

I even went to a particular cell of a Father Kolbe, a Catholic priest
who in the death camp gave his life to protect a Jewish member there.
When they were ready to shoot him, Father Kolbe stepped forward to
offer his life instead. Father Kolbe, in my faith tradition, has been
canonized a saint for his heroic effort to show that he was willing to
martyr himself for another human being, and in the belief that God was
there in what he wanted to do.

But as I walked through there--and I saw hard things, tough things,
wrenching things, repulsive, repugnant things. But then I got to the
part that really broke my heart. I got to the part about the children.
Pictures of children--little children. Not that any child's age is
there. And then I saw the bins--the bins of the children's shoes: bins
piled up with little shoes size 2, size 3, size 4, lace-up shoes,
because they were the shoes they had in the 1930s and 1940s. And then I
saw their suitcases. Then over in another corner I saw the eyeglasses
that were taken from them and broken into pieces. Then I saw the
pictures of the mothers.

I will tell you, I became unglued. I had to step away. Even today,
when I tell this story, my voice chokes up because it shook my very
soul.

So as we move into this commemoration--because it is both a
celebration and a commemoration--a celebration of the liberation but a
commemoration of what went on. I knew when I left Auschwitz--I knew and
I understood why, first of all, we should never have genocide in the
world again.

The second thing, and also so crucial to my views, is that there
always needed to be a homeland for the Jewish people--why we always
need an Israel, why it has to be there, survivable for the ages, and
for all who will seek a home there and seek refuge there. This is why I
worked so hard on these issues in terms of the support for Israel, the
end of genocide, and also the gratitude for all the people who fought--
for the people who fought in the underground, for people who fought in
the resistance, for people who tried to participate in the famous
uprisings; to thank God also for the other fighters--the ones who in
the camp gave whatever they could to keep other camp members going; and
then, for the allied troops, led by the United States of America--
there, where we stood together, we stood and stared evil down; and
then, when we opened up the doors of Auschwitz, for freedom and the
ability to come out, though barely alive--that it was indeed an
historic moment.

We don't want that history ever to repeat itself, where there has to
be a liberation of a death camp.

I would also take this opportunity to salute the allies and all the
American people who made us victorious in World War II.

Let's say God bless the United States of America. And let's work
together for a safe and secure Middle East.

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