Visiting Auschwitz for the first time on Wednesday made a deep impression on Andrés Montalvo Sosa, Ecuadorian ambassador to the United Nations.
“It’s overwhelming to be here to really see what happened to humanity, to be able to understand what people think about this, what the Jews think about this, what the people of Israel think about this,” he told JNS exclusively.
“There is no other way to understand,” the envoy said.
The ambassador was part of a delegation of diplomats from 20 countries that is taking part in a trip to Poland and Israel led by Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
Montlavo Sosa told JNS that having visited the former Nazi concentration camp, he feels “solidarity with the people of Israel with what happened.”
“As a new witness, I am certainly committed to transmit what I’ve seen here,” he said.
Danon led the delegation, which includes the German and Czech ambassadors to the United Nations, to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday. The group is also slated to visit Israel to view sites that were attacked on Oct. 7 and to meet with Israeli officials in the northern and southern parts of the country.
Ricklef Beutin, German ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS after visiting the concentration camp on Wednesday that “continuous education about the Holocaust and what happened specifically here in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the industrial annihilation machine is important and continues to be as important as it was.”
“Antisemitism is not only still around, but it’s on the rise in many places,” he said.
Hynek Kmoníček, Czech ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS that he has visited Auschwitz before and that he was born about 150 miles from the camp. It was important to come with other diplomats, he said.
“It’s a political and historical process which has its steps, which are needed to push normal people to do the crimes they could have never imagined,” he said.
“It’s sometimes hard to grasp unless you come here and you try to understand and give your emotions into that understanding, because then the history becomes the knowledge,” he told JNS.
Amid rising Jew-hatred worldwide since Oct. 7, Beutin told JNS that Holocaust education is as pressing as ever.
