The grim reality
is that 75 years after the world got
confirmation of the breadth of the Holocaust anti-Semitism is on the rise
in the United States and in Europe.
As the last survivors of
the death camps and the Allied soldiers who liberated them dwindle the collective
memory has dimmed. Polls constantly
show that younger people are at best foggy
on the reality—many can’t place World
War II within 50 years on a time
line, are unsure who the combatants were and on who was responsible for barely understood atrocities. Holocaust
denial is on the rise spread
mainly by those who try to mask their own intentions to “complete the job.” Right wing nationalism is on the rise
in Europe making substantial gains
in several national parliaments and
coming to power in Poland and other Eastern European Countries.
Lethal anti-Semitism is on the rise once again. A memorial to the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.
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In the U.S. White
nationalism has broken out of the pariah
fringe of society and is making
a bid for respectability as it is
given barely concealed wink and nod
support from the President himself. Just this week virulent anti-Semite Rick Wiles was openly boasting for
being granted a press pass to cover Donald Trump’s visit to the International Climate Forum in Davos, Switzerland for his TruNews
streaming “news service” which has
been beating the drums for a theory
that a Jewish conspiracy is behind
the impeachment of the Resident—music to Trump’s ears. Deadly mass
shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue
in Pittsburgh and at a kosher grocery in New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing
attack on a suburban New York home
Hanukkah celebration are only the
most widely noted events. Vandalism and
attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other Jewish institutions are on a sharp rise. Anti-Semitic flyers and propaganda
are being posted at colleges, universities, and high schools as well as in suburban communities. White nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic
groups continue to thrive in social
media.
Confounding attempts to
counter these dangerous trends are
the Israeli government’s campaign to
tar every critic of its brutal and
unrelenting attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank,
and now in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and
other cities as anti-Semites. Trump is
happy to echo those charges and to support efforts to virtually outlaw calls for economic and cultural boycotts of the Jewish
state. Trump, who has been largely silent during Israel’s
escalating attacks and Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s announced plans to recognize and annex all
of the illegal settlements in the West Bank, chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to
host the Prime Minister and his chief political
rival Benny Gantz to push a
still secret “peace plan.” The meeting will probably accomplish nothing
for peace, but will be a diversion for both Trump and Netanyahu who face domestic investigations.
The Hall of Names keeps the memories of individual Holocaust victims alive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
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Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It will be observed—celebrated is certainly the wrong word here—in ways big and small,
significant and trivial in many places across the world. The commemoration comes on the anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
death camps in Poland
by the advancing Red Army on January 27, 1945. American, British,
Canadian, and other Allied Forces liberated other camps, but
Auschwitz was the pinnacle of efficiency for the Nazi
industrialization of mass murder.
On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation the United
Nations General Assembly held a special commemorative session. The
following November the General Assembly created the memorial day, which was
first observed in 2006.
Some of the healthier inmates of Auschwitz after liberation by the Red Army.
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In November of 1944 as the Red Army advanced from the East
and the Allies pressed on the Western Front, SS Chief Heinrich
Himmler ordered the beginning to the eradication of evidence of
death camps in Poland. Gassing operations were suspended
and crematoria at Auschwitz were ordered destroyed or, in one
case, converted into a bomb shelter. As things got worse,
Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in early January directing
that “not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy.”
On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were set
on a death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski.
Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April
1945.
But that left over 8,000 of the weakest and sickest
abandoned with scant supplies. The Red Army 322nd
Rifle Division arrived 10 days later to find 7,500 barely alive and
600 corpses lying where ever they finally collapsed. They
also found much evidence of the greater crimes Himmler had hoped to
hide—370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s garments, and 7.7
tons of human hair. Coming in the midst of the Yalta Conference and
other war news, the liberation received scant news attention at
the time. And the Soviets, who were at best ambivalent at the highest levels about
what to do with the liberated Jews, did little to publicly celebrate
their role in the liberation, at least at first.
It was only after survivors reached the West and
eventually Israel as refugees, that Auschwitz emerged as a special,
horrific symbol of the whole Holocaust.
Emaciated survivors at Buchenwald, a major extermination camp liberated by American troops.
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The publication of the Diary of Ann Frank, Ellie Wiesel’s Night, and other memoirs
by survivors, camp liberators, and on-the-scene journalists made deep
public impressions in the West as did films
like Stephen Spielberg’s Shindler’s List. Evidence of the Holocaust has been
carefully preserved at Israel’s Yad
Vashem, the world central archive
of Holocaust-related information and at Holocaust
museums in many major cities. Public acknowledgement of the Holocaust
probably peaked internationally
around the turn of the 21st Century and has been eroding since then.
World leaders gathered at the World Holocaust Forum 2020 at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
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This year the 75th anniversary was marked by a special
meeting at the Fifth World Holocaust
Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Over 50 international leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain’s
Prince Charles, and American
Vice-President Mike Pence were on hand for the event. They heard Netanyahu denounce critics of
Israel as Anti-Semites and to beat the band for an international attack against
Iran. Other leader, except Pence, generally
distanced themselves from Netanyahu’s remarks and spoke in platitudes of varying
degrees of sincerity about
preventing any future genocide.
Today there will be solemn
remembrance gatherings at the sites of most of the World War II death camps and
in cities around the world
Together we can truly
pledge “Never Again!” and mean it
for Jews and for the modern targets of repression,
oppression, apartheid like ghettoization,
and even actual genocidal attacks including
the Kurds and the Palestinians.
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