A group of Holocaust survivors has issued a joint appeal before this weekend’s European parliament election urging younger voters to go to the polls and to exercise their right to prevent the far right from gaining power.
“For millions of you, the European poll is the first election in your life. For many of us it could be the last,” the eight survivors, wrote in the letter. “We couldn’t prevent [the rise of nazism] back then, but you can today.”
It is addressed: “To our granddaughters and grandsons, to first-time voters, to all democrats.”
The open letter was coordinated by Avaaz, a global citizens’ web movement to promote people power, which has been campaigning for greater voter participation in the election.
About 373 million citizens across the 27 member states of the European Union are eligible to vote from 6 to 9 June on the makeup of the European parliament.
In 21 countries, people aged 18 and above are able to vote, while in Germany, Belgium, Malta and Austria, the minimum age is 16, and in Greece it is 17.
Eva Umlauf, who survived Auschwitz having arrived there as a two-year-old with her mother, said: “The number they branded on my arm stands as a constant reminder, a warning of another time, which must never return. But for that we need the active participation of young people in the decision-making process to ensure that the hate and propaganda we were victims of back then isn’t repeated.”
Umlauf, 81, whose memoir The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes will be published in English on 20 June, said the rise in popularity of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, where 64.9 million people make up the biggest proportion of voters from any country, made this election more crucial than any other in recent times.
“If you look at the programme of the AfD, how they are against women, foreigners, Jews, and how they participated in a so-called remigration conference to get rid of foreigners from Germany, how their supporters tout the Nazi slogan: ‘Germany for the Germans’. There are clear parallels to the past.
“Then take social media – these parties are very, very active on many channels trying to attract young people, as Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, did so effectively with far fewer means.”
Umlauf, who works as a psychoanalyst in Munich treating people with transgenerational trauma transferred from their grandparents’ and parents’ experience of nazism, said: “This trauma of both the victims and the perpetrators spreads from one generation to the next. It does not go away. It marks people’s lives decades later.”
Ruth Winkelmann, 95, described hiding from the Nazis for more than two years in a garden shed with her mother and sister in the north of Berlin, “living in fear night and day”. She recalled arriving at her Jewish school in central Berlin the day after Kristallnacht in November 1938, when mobs carried out state-sanctioned, murderous attacks on Jewish homes and businesses across the country.
“They barricaded the entrance with rubbish and debris, smearing the school with slogans, then we saw the smoke from the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse as they set the Torah scrolls alight. I still remember as if it was yesterday, the sadistic looks on the faces of the people… I went home and my mother took me in her arms saying: ‘We have to hope this doesn’t repeat itself.’ Little did she know what was to come,” she said.
When the war ended in May 1945, she recalled: “Me and my mother screamed with joy: ‘We’re free!’, while those around us were fearful of what their lives would be with the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship. They were scared of freedom. I want every young person to realise how precious that freedom is, but to know that they have to fight for it. Voting is a way to do that.”
Speaking on video link from his living room in Stockholm, Walter Frankenstein, who was forced to hide in the Berlin underground for 25 months, said: “The similarities between then and now are there, as we see political parties gathering the dissatisfied and stoking the dissatisfaction, just like Hitler did… It is no good for young people to say: ‘I don’t know who to vote for, I’d rather not vote.’ However good or bad a democracy is, it’s always better than a dictatorship.”
Due to mark his 100th birthday on 30 June, Frankenstein said: “The best birthday present for me would be if everyone voted for a democratic party to secure our democracy, which is a precious thing.”
Turnout at the European election has always been low since voting began in 1979. At the last election in 2019, the 50.7% was a record high. The lowest turnout, less than 43%, was in 2014.
In a separate European parliament campaign video viewed more than 190 million times, elderly Europeans, including survivors of the Holocaust, also address their grandchildren, under the slogan: “Use your vote or others will decide for you.”
