Film icon Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the site of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz on Wednesday, gathered a Holocaust survivor and the son of Holocaust survivors and said it was time to “end” the hatred.
The “Terminator” actor and former governor of California thought of the barracks, watchtowers and remnants of fuel chambers that persist as evidence of the German extermination of Jews and others in World War II.
He also met a woman who, at the age of 3, underwent experiments through prominent Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
“It’s a story that has to stay alive, it’s a story we have to tell again and again,” he said after visiting the death camp, speaking at a former synagogue that now houses the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.
He stood alongside Simon Bergson, the president of the foundation, who was born after the war of the Auschwitz survivors, and discussed the history of his own circle of relatives.
“I am the son of a man who fought in the Nazi war and a soldier,” said Schwarzenegger, 75, in Oswiecim, the city where the Auschwitz site is located.
He said he and Bergson, who are of legal age, were united in their work.
“Let’s fight prejudice in combination and end it once and for all,” Schwarzenegger said.
Bergson added, “Arnold and I are living evidence that within a generation, hatred can be completely displaced. Governor, thank you for joining us today.
His stopover at the site in southern Poland, which was under German World War II direction, was his first and was part of his work with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, whose project is to combat hatred through education.
He won the foundation’s inaugural “Fighting Hatred” award in June for his stance against hate on social media. He said he couldn’t attend at the time because he was filming a new action series in Canada and in a “COVID bubble. “
He promised that Wednesday would not be his last.
“I’ll be back,” he said, a prominent line from “The Terminator. “
Schwarzenegger, who is originally from Austria, spoke brazenly in the afterlife about his father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, being a Nazi soldier in the war.
He told Russians in a video posted on social media in March that they were being lied to about the war in Ukraine and accused President Vladimir Putin of sacrificing Russians for his own ambitions.
In this video, he evoked painful memories of how his own father lied to him while he was fighting, and how he returned to Austria damaged, physically and emotionally, after being wounded in Leningrad.
Historians estimate that around 1. 1 million people were killed at Auschwitz during the war. About 1 million of them were Jews. Some 75,000 Poles died there, as well as Roma, Russian prisoners of war and others.
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Gera reported from Warsaw.
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