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| Photo Credit: AP. |
OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — Film icon Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the site of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp on Wednesday, meeting a Holocaust survivor and the son of Holocaust survivors and saying it is time to “terminate” hatred.
The
“Terminator” actor and former California governor viewed the barracks,
watchtowers and remains of gas chambers that endure as evidence of the German
extermination of Jews and others during World War II.
He also met
with a woman who as a 3-year-old child was subjected to experiments by the
notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
“This is a
story that has to stay alive, this is a story that we have to tell over and
over again,” he said after his visit to the site of the death camp, speaking in
a former synagogue that now is home to the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.
He stood
alongside Simon Bergson, the foundation’s chairman, who was born after the war
to Auschwitz survivors, and mentioned his own family history.
“I was the
son of a man who fought in the Nazi war and was a soldier,” the 75-year-old Schwarzenegger
said in Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz site is located.
He said he
and Bergson, who are close in age, were united in their work.
“Let’s fight
prejudice together and let’s just terminate it once and for all,”
Schwarzenegger said.
Bergson
added: “Arnold and I are living proof that within one generation hatred can be
shifted entirely. Governor, thank you for joining us here today.”
His visit to
the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during WWII, was
his first and came as part of his work with the Auschwitz Jewish Center
Foundation, whose mission is to fight hatred through education.
He received
the foundation’s inaugural “Fighting Hatred” award in June for his anti-hatred
stance on social media. He said he couldn’t attend in person then because he
was filming a new action series in Canada and was in a “COVID bubble.”
He vowed
that Wednesday’s visit would not be his last.
“I’ll be
back,” he said, using a famous line from “The Terminator.”
Schwarzenegger,
who is originally from Austria, has spoken openly in the past about his father,
Gustav Schwarzenegger, being a Nazi soldier during 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
Russian soldiers to his own ambitions.
In that
video he brought up painful memories about how his own father was lied to as he
fought, and how he returned to Austria a broken man, physically and
emotionally, after being wounded at Leningrad.
Historians
estimate that around 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz during the
war. Around 1 million of them were Jews. Some 75,000 Poles were killed there,
as well as Roma, Russian prisoners of war and others.
Gera
reported from Warsaw.