Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘holocaust’

The news that the infamous ”Arbeit macht frei” sign that hung over Auschwitz had been stolen last Friday sent shockwaves around the world. Now, Polish police say they have recovered the sign and apprehended the thieves:

KRAKOW, Poland – Polish police said Monday they had recovered the Nazi German “Arbeit macht frei” sign stolen from the former Auschwitz death camp, but said five arrested suspects had no neo-Nazi links.

Andrzej Rokita, commander in the southern Polish city of Krakow, told reporters that “from the information we have none of the five belong to a neo-Nazi group nor hold such ideas”.

The five suspects, aged 20 to 39 and with previous criminal records for theft or violence, faced up to 10 years in prison if convicted, police said.

The thieves themsevels seem to have been hired guns, in it for the money. It remains to be seen whether they were hired by someone with more sinister motives. In any case, the whole episode was extremely bizarre.

But for those asking what kind of scum of the earth would do such a thing, I’d have to say that question should more appropriately be asked of those who perpetrated the crime of Auschwitz in the first place.

Update 01/04: The theft was apparently ordered by a British neo-Nazi, in yet another example of hate being stronger than cash.

He’s ranked number four in a list of the world’s most wanted and notorious Nazi war criminals. But – all together now – that doesn’t mean he’s not a nice person, right?

Milivoj Asner caused a stir just by showing up at a soccer game: The frail 95-year-old is ranked No. 4 on a leading list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects.

Now Austria’s most notorious far-right politician, former Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, has touched off an even bigger scandal by praising Asner as a “treasured” neighbor who should be allowed to live out his days in peace.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and some private citizens, are fighting a battle to have Asner extradited to Croatia, but so far, the Austrian government has been holding out. Cases like these are more important than ever for their symbolic value, as more people in the world sadly start to subscribe to the lies that are replacing the truth that too few are alive anymore to tell.

Today is Raoul Wallenberg Day in Canada. Not many people know that. I knew but forgot, and had to be reminded by this article in today’s paper:

He is one of only two honourary Canadian citizens (along with Nelson Mandela), yet few know of him. One of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century, yet virtually unknown in the country that chose to make him one of us. There’s something wrong here.

Why should we still care about Raoul Wallenberg? After all, it has been 62 years since he was arrested by the Russians, on Jan. 17, 1945, and vanished into another totalitarian killing machine, never to reappear.

Here’s why.

In the face of the darkest evil during the Second World War, Wallenberg left his quiet neutral country, Sweden, and went to Budapest, one of the bloodiest places of the war, to save people of a different religion, ethnicity and tradition.

Defying the Nazis, he rushed to death-camp deportation sites, using his consular status to hand out coveted papers with the seal of the government of Sweden.

He rescued those bound for death and delivered them to safe houses where they were protected from the Nazi death machine. He saved thousands – 100,000 people would certainly have been murdered if not for his intervention. Acting alone in Budapest, on his own initiative, he saved more lives during the Holocaust than any government in the world. Sounds impossible, but it is true.

I am constantly amazed at his staggering achievement, and the terrible irony of his life story – the hero rescuer who is himself imprisoned and silenced.

Read the rest. And, if you can, pause for a moment to pay tribute to this man who was truly one of the Righteous among the Nations.

Oprah Winfrey has selected Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as her latest book club pick, catapulting the famous book on the Holocaust onto the bestseller list over a half-century after it was first published.

“Night” was required reading in high school French class (though I seem to remember most of us cheating by picking up the English translation from the library). It’s a powerful book and Wiesel emerged as one of the key voices of conscience on the Holocaust. There was a time when Wiesel’s word would have carried more weight than Oprah’s.

Then again, with Holocaust-denial on the rise (from the usual suspects and the Left and the Arab world), and with the generation of survivors slowly disappearing, perhaps this was the right time to push the book back into the spotlight.

Something Damian Penny wrote the other day came back to me just now: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Damian was, of course, referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial. However, I think the quote is a good one, and it popped into my head when I read about today’s ruling against teaching creationism in schools:

A federal judge on Tuesday banned the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution by Pennsylvania’s Dover Area School District, saying the practice violated the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

[ . . . ]

The school district was sued by a group of 11 parents who claimed teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional and unscientific and had no place in high school biology classrooms.

Before you jump down my throat, I’m in no way implying that Holocaust denial is comparable to creationism. What I am saying, however, is that there’s a clear difference between fact and invention – as in the case of Holocaust denial – which I think we all recognize fairly easily. What many people fail to recognize, however, is that we must also make a clear distinction between fact and belief.

Evolution is a scientific fact. Creationism (repackaged as “intelligent design” or whatever you rename it) is a belief. It is based on faith, not evidence, and cannot be proven for the simple reason that it cannot be disproven.

Today’s ruling banned the teaching of creationism because it violates the separation of church and state. I think the real reason it ought to be banned from science curricula is because it isn’t science. After all, there is no constitutional ban on teaching Holocaust denial in history class, and yet I’m sure we would all call for the dismissal of any teacher who tried, simply on the grounds that it’s wrong.

I have no objection to the teaching of creationist theory in a course about religion, humanities, or cultural studies. But high school biology teachers who teach creationism as scientific fact are muddling fact and belief. People are entitled to hold a belief, but when teaching science, they need to stick to facts.

And so, to restate Damian’s point, everyone is entitled to his own beliefs, but not his own facts.

European Union to Iran: stop denying the Holocaust, or we’ll denounce you.

I’m sure that threat has Ahmadinejad shaking in his boots.

The real question is whether Ahmadinejad is calculating and shrewd, or if he’s merely off his rocker.

Most of the time, rhetoric and provocation like this is done on purpose by despots looking to pick a fight for political gain, deflect attention away from their oppressive policies, or quell dissent at home, to name a few reasons. It’s entirely possible that Ahmadinejad is doing this in order to provoke the West to the point where someone takes action, and all hell breaks loose. Strange as this may sound, this would actually be the preferable of the two options. If Ahmadinejad is crazy like a fox, as opposed to merely crazy, then he probably wouldn’t actually unleash nuclear weapons on Israel – he’d just talk about it in order to stir up hatred. As I’ve said repeatedly, the very last thing that most of the dictators of the Arab world want is for Israel to disappear off the map. Because without Israel as the single unifying factor, they would simply attack each other (well, more so than they already do).

However, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s entirely possible that Ahmadinejad is just as crazy as he seems. His fanatical hatred of Israel might not be calculated, but real. In which case, the world has real cause to worry, because he might not care if Iran is wiped off the map as long as he can take Israel down with him. This is where the prospect of a nuclear Iran becomes very, very scary.

So which is it? Column A? Column B? A little of both? I don’t really think we have the option of waiting around to find out. But then, who’s left in the world to actually do anything to stop Ahmadinejad, before it’s too late?

Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day when this would happen: The United Nations has unanimously declared an international Holocaust Day in commemoration of the Holocaust and as a stand against antisemitism and genocide:

The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday unanimously approved a proposal to set January 27 as the “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” The decision was made at the end of a special General Assembly session that began at UN headquarters in New York on Monday.

[ . . . ]

It also rejects any denial of the Holocaust, condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity, and calls for the UN to establish an outreach program to encourage the public to engage in Holocaust remembrance activities.

The resolution, introduced Monday, was sponsored initially by Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada and Russia. Since the draft resolution was distributed for the first time in August, 91 UN member nations have added their names, including eight Muslim countries and several countries in Africa and South America.

Of course, we can’t expect an unconditional condemnation of atrocities against Jews from the United Nations:

Jordan’s UN Ambassador Prince Zeid al-Hussein called the Holocaust “a crime of the most colossal proportions” that was inflicted on European soil by Europeans against Europeans.

But he said it should not be used as a moral justification for the “continued domination of one people by another,” an obvious reference to Israel and the Palestinians.

That much is to be expected, but I find it amazing that so many Muslim countries actually passed the resolution in the first place.

So is this the UN’s “pound of flesh” that they can point to – an easy way to claim to be against antisemitism each time it condemns Israel for some pointless double-standard in the future? Or is the sentiment genuine?

Oh well… Whatever it is, it’s a step in the right direction.

Today is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It is a day to remember the 6 million who perished.

But beyond that, it is a day of reflection: on the world that let it happen, on Jewish identity before and after the Holocaust, on Israel and its role, and on where we go from here.

Sadly, this day gets more and more relevant each year, as antisemitism rises and the world sits idly by.

Meryl has some must-read links. Jewlicious has the story of the MTV Holocaust commemoration special, which is probably not as irreverant as it sounds (at least I hope not). Allison has second-grade humour with a bitter Holocaust twist. And Jewschool promotes a rally against the genocide going on in Sudan’s Darfur region – only the latest chapter in the countless episodes of “Again” that have occurred since we resolved “Never Again”.

I can’t seem to find the words today to express my feelings reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

Horror at the atrocities that will be shocking no matter how many times we hear or read about them.

Pride that the Jewish people is today so strong and is standing at the gates of the former death camp, declaring with our presence that we are alive and that the Nazis failed.

Anger at the world that pays lip service to the anniversary and condones and promotes antisemitism the rest of the time.

Disgust that Jewish people are pitied by the world for being weak, but loathed by the world when we are strong.

Sadness at the thought that the generation bearing witness will soon be gone, outnumbered by the racists and deniers, and apprehension at what this will mean for “never forget”.

Fear for the future of Israel and for the future of freedom in the world.

Disappointment in the human race’s seeming inability to learn from the past.

As the world remembers and reacts, mostly I wonder about the lessons of the Holocaust. What has the world really learned? In the wake of horrors in Kosovo, Bosnia, the DRC, Sudan, North Korea… how can we claim that we’ve learned anything? Since the beginning of time, human beings have shown a cold genius in inventing new ways to cruelly murder one another. Was the Holocaust just another part of that?

Today the world remembers. But it does not learn.

As the UN commemmorates the Holocaust, it seems that many Canadians haven’t learnt much about it in the first place:

In a poll released Monday by the Association for Canadian Studies, 35 per cent of Quebecers surveyed said they believe other nationalities – Poles, mainly – were the principal victims of the Nazis, not Jews.

That’s higher than any other province, but not by much: the Canadian average is 29 per cent.

In a separate question asked in the association’s telephone poll, only 36 per cent of Quebecers could identify six million as the correct number of Jews killed by the Nazis (the Canadian average was 31 per cent).

It seems the Holocaust-deniers have made some strides over the years.

I’d like to see the questions asked before I can judge this poll on its face, but it’s hard to fathom what lies ahead for the next generation, after those who bear witness are gone.