Gor Badalyan is a 2024 McCain Global Leader from Armenia. Members of the 2024 McCain Global Leaders cohort visited Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of their Changemaker Tour.
This was not my first time in Poland, yet each visit until now had kept me within Warsaw’s familiar streets. Warsaw had always seemed to me like a city wrapped in a quiet reserve, a certain guardedness. Months ago, in the United States, I met a young woman of Polish heritage. I told her, perhaps too bluntly, “You know, Poles are very cold.” She didn’t flinch. Instead, she smiled softly and replied, “Yes, we are cold on the outside, but warm on the inside.” We both laughed, and the conversation drifted on.
I remembered her words as I returned to Poland on the McCain Global Leaders Changemakers Tour with fellow leaders from Europe and Eurasia. This time, I saw the country differently. Not just the surface politeness or the quiet demeanor, but the values born from scars, scars of loss, of resistance, and of endurance. The Nazi genocide of Jews, the heroism of the Warsaw Uprising, the determination to reclaim identity and sovereignty all of it painted a more complete picture for me.
As an Armenian, my steps on this tour carried a heavier weight. My roots trace back to my great-grandmother, the only one in her family to survive the slaughter of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. She escaped the brutal threat of the Ottoman Turks, while her mother’s brothers and sisters were beheaded and burned before her eyes. The Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Turks, claimed the lives of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians through massacres, deportations, and starvation, a crime still denied by its perpetrators today. My grandmother passed these stories to me, and they have become part of my family’s living memory, a memory I am committed to sharing with my children and future generations so that it is neither forgotten nor denied. For Armenians, these stories are not just history; they are a pulse that beats through our lives, a constant reminder of both survival and loss.
When our group arrived at Auschwitz, the air itself seemed heavy. The sky was a muted grey, the kind that presses down on your shoulders. As our guide began her introduction, Hitler’s infamous question surged in my mind: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The words landed like a stone in my chest. They reminded me that genocide is not only an act of physical destruction but a calculated attempt to erase memory. Here, the Nazis murdered not only Jews, but also Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, and others they deemed unworthy of life. In that moment, I barely heard the guide. My mind was already traveling back to 1915, to the villages, to the cries, to the fields where my ancestors vanished into silence.
Walking through the camp, we came to the rooms where the personal belongings of Auschwitz’s victims are preserved. Behind glass walls were piles mountains of human hair, shoes worn thin, suitcases marked with names and destinations that would never be reached. The scale was staggering; there was no way to count them. Each lock of hair, each pair of shoes, each battered suitcase held a story cut short. Involuntarily, my mind reached for the images I had seen in Armenian archives: bodies piled into human pyramids, left in the sun to decay; homes emptied of life; names erased from the record. Here in Auschwitz, the Jews had been burned to ash. In 1915, Armenians were left to dissolve into the earth. The methods were different, but the result was the same a deliberate eradication of a people.
During the tour, my attention kept drifting to my friend Alina, a fellow participant from Germany. I watched her as she moved through the camp her eyes shifting between the artifacts, her face tightening, her breath slowing. Later, she told me she felt a deep sense of responsibility as if carrying a collective guilt and accountability across generations. She also felt deep sadness, and kept asking herself which side she would have stood on had she lived during that time. The truth, she said, is that none of us can ever know. And perhaps that uncertainty is what makes moral courage so essential now. And then my thoughts turned to young Turks today, traveling across what remains of historic Armenia, Bitlis, Mus, Van, Mardin, Igdır, Adana etc. Do they feel the echo of the people who once lived there? Do they ask questions? Do they hear the silence?
Auschwitz is a place of silence, but not of peace. The quiet there is charged thick with the absence of those who should have grown old, had families, told their own stories. That silence demands something from you. It demands that you carry it forward.
Every day, I see the world slipping further into the shadows of authoritarianism. Dictatorships rise, freedoms are eroded, human rights are treated as optional luxuries. The threats to democracy grow sharper and bolder. In such a world, memory becomes a form of resistance. Our greatest weapon is the refusal to forget, the refusal to look away, and the refusal to grow numb. We must stand firm, even when it is exhausting. We must keep learning and keep teaching. Knowledge and moral courage are the tools that protect our freedoms and without them, history will repeat its worst chapters.
For me, recognizing the Armenian Genocide is not just a personal conviction; it is a moral obligation. I will not hide it, and I will not let it be erased. In Auschwitz, I entered a room whose walls were covered with paintings created by the hands of little children, faced with incredible darkness. Hand-drawn paintings that held out hope. It was infinitely painful. In that moment, my thoughts went to the children in Gaza today, dying in a different kind of horror. I wished that those in positions of power in Israel today, and those who shape its policies, could stand in that room, see those drawings, and ask themselves the hardest questions about humanity, compassion, and justice.
Senator John McCain once said: “I believe that genocide was committed against the Armenian people, and I think there is ample documentation of that.” Those words, simple yet resolute, are an acknowledgment of truth in a world too often tempted by denial. They remind us that documentation matters, that speaking out matters, and that history demands both. And that is why I stand today, crossing paths with the McCain Institute because I believe that remembering is not enough. We must also act, teach, and bear witness.
When I left Auschwitz, the sky was still grey, but I carried a piece of its weight with me. It is the weight of memory, of responsibility, of connection between past and present. It is the understanding that my story as an Armenian and the story of the Jews in Auschwitz are not separate, they are threads in the same human fabric. And if we let those threads be cut, we unravel the very promise of “never again.”
When we forget, we risk repeating. When we remember together, we strengthen democracy’s promise of never again.