Resistance, rescue, liberation, and memory

Even under conditions designed to crush all resistance, people resisted. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April-May 1943, poorly armed Jewish fighters held off German forces for weeks before the ghetto was ultimately destroyed; resistance also took the form of partisan fighting in Eastern European forests and even an uprising by prisoners forced to work in a crematorium at Auschwitz in 1944. Other people, at real risk to their own lives, chose to rescue: the industrialist Oskar Schindler saved more than a thousand Jewish workers in his factories, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg issued protective passports that saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, and the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered thousands of Jewish refugees -- rescuers Israel's Yad Vashem memorial later honored as "Righteous Among the Nations." Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager hidden with her family in Amsterdam, kept a diary that survives as one of the most widely read primary sources of the entire era; she was captured in 1944 and died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945, just weeks before liberation.

As Allied and Soviet forces advanced in 1944 and 1945, they liberated the camps and confronted the world with undeniable, direct evidence of what had happened: Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, a date now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, while British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and American forces liberated Buchenwald and Dachau that April. In the decades since, survivor testimony -- including memoirs like Elie Wiesel's Night -- has remained crucial primary-source evidence of the Holocaust, anchoring the enduring commitment captured in the phrase "Never Again" and the ongoing importance of Holocaust education worldwide.