Letters to the Editor: 75 years after Auschwitz’s liberation, people are forgetting

To the editor: I appreciate that the L.A. Times published lengthy reports on the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp liberation in Nazi-occupied Poland.

People in my family left Europe, as did so many others before the turn of the 20th century, and headed to the new world. They were from Poland and must have left many relatives behind. Those who stayed almost assuredly met their ends at the hands of the Nazi regime.

Today, anti-Semitism is on the rise in Poland. People do forget, and the results are frightening.

Dean Katz, Hollywood Hills

..

To the editor: The number of hate-crime incidents targeting Jews increased by 37% in 2017, according to the FBI. What else happened in 2017? President Trump was sworn in.

His divisive rhetoric, his language and his infamous remarks on the Charlottesville, Va., neo-Nazi rally in 2017 have contributed to the rise in racism.

Trump saw the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville with their tiki torches yelling, “Jews will not replace us,” and when asked about this sick rally, one of the things he said was, “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

The neo-Nazis and white nationalists loved his response. It gave them the green light to continue with their hateful rhetoric.

As Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski said, the Holocaust happened because of indifference in the world to anti-Semitism. We cannot be indifferent, and we cannot be silent. We must fight hate.

Lindsay Soderlund, Glendale