It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything,” said Holocaust survivor Jona Laks, 94, about her return to Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

World leaders and a dwindling group of survivors joined in a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp by the Red Army.

Ruth Cohen, a 94-year-old American Holocaust survivor, returned to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland for the first time. She recalled seeing family members before they were separated for the last time at the camp.

January 27, 2025, marks Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. CNN’s Melissa Bell sits down with survivors to speak about the importance of this specific anniversary.

That creates risks: the Holocaust didn’t begin with mass murder. The dehumanization of Jews progressed gradually from public exclusion to eventual internment to finally extermination. Millions of regular Germans—and Europeans more broadly—facilitated or silently accepted these actions.

Auschwitz survivors warned of the dangers of rising antisemitism on Monday, as they marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp by Soviet troops in one of the last such gatherings of those who experienced its horrors.