The Independent
January 27, 2005
UNIQUE REMINDER OF INHUMANITY THAT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
THE SIXTIETH anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today has a
special sense of dignity. As with the D-Day anniversary last year,
there is inevitably a sense of a passing of the generation who
remembered and were part of it, a thinning of the cord that connects
the past with new generations who must learn about it afresh.
This is reason perhaps to feel a particular solemnity this year, to
stand in sorrow at the loss of so many lives and in appalled
knowledge of what man is capable of doing to man. Only those who
survived, those who witnessed the death camps or who had relations
who died there, can know the full extent of grief that the Holocaust
brought. But it remains in its scale and its full bureaucratic
ruthlessness a crime that had, and must continue to have,
reverberations through all humanity.
Auschwitz itself was not only an extermination camp for Jews, of
course. Tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, gypsies, homosexuals
and others whom the Nazis defined as subhuman, also died there. But
it has come to have a special meaning in the Holocaust, accounting
for up to 1 million of the 6 million Jews who died as victims of the
world’s most horrendous genocide.
Was the Holocaust then a unique event, an “exceptional” act of mass
murder that can only be understood in Jewish historical terms, or was
it part of a wider pattern of brutality, a peculiarly brutal part to
be sure, but one with implications for us all?
The answer must be that it was – and is – both. The anti-Semitism
that encouraged the persecution of Jews throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages and beyond and allowed the Nazis to define them as a
sub-species of mankind to be wiped off their lands has not
disappeared. It did not start with the rise to power of Hitler and it
did not end with his fall. Given that history, Jews have a special
reason for feeling that the Holocaust should be invoked as a constant
rallying cry to stamp out even the most isolated signs of a
resurgence in anti-Semitic propaganda and assault.
But the Holocaust was not alone as an act of genocide in a century
filled with massacres of civilians and ethnic violence. Armenians,
Tutsi, Chechens, Aborigines, Marsh Arabs, Nubian tribesmen – the list
of victims of race or colour is endless, not to mention the millions
of their own countrymen killed or starved by Stalin, Mao Zedong and
Pol Pot. In that sense the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
cannot be just an occasion to remember a uniquely horrifying episode
in history. Within five years millions of Hindus and Muslims were
being killed for their religion in the break-up of India. Half a
century later, Rwanda proved that virtually an entire people could be
slaughtered – and the world would let it happen.
There is reason for optimism as well as gloom. The reaction to the
horrors of Nazism and the World War it unleashed led to the creation
of both the United Nations and then the European Common Market. It is
now impossible to conceive of any resurgence of the national conflict
in Europe that brought with it two world wars. The collapse of the
Soviet Union has also brought with it an opportunity for countries
such as Poland, Hungary and Romania to face up to their past, and
particularly the Holocaust.
But faced with the ethnic violence and civilian massacres in Darfur,
no one could say that the lessons of the last century have been
learnt, or that the international community has yet found a way of
preventing them. Nor, listening to the debate about immigration, can
anyone say that all people have learnt generosity towards their
fellow men. Fear of the foreigner, suspicion of the outsider, lies
close to the surface of every society, ready to break out in calls
for action when pressures seem threatening. One man’s concern about
security all too easily becomes a crowd’s call to imprison or reject
a whole group. We will need to remember Auschwitz long after its last
survivor has gone.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress