STOP BLURRING HOLOCAUST MEMORY
Michael Freund
Jerusalem Post, January 25, 2012
[Friday, January 27th] marks the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army in the waning days of World War II. That epic event provided the world with a glimpse into the potential darkness of the human soul, as stunned Soviet soldiers came face to face with the irrefutable depravity of the German genocide against the Jewish people.
The troops found over 7,000 ill and emaciated inmates struggling to hang on to life, as well as stark evidence of the extent of the Nazis’ crimes. Hundreds of thousands of men’s and women’s garments, and over 14,000 pounds of human hair, all bore witness to the mass murder that had taken place there. In all of modern history, the German assault on the Jews stood out for its systematic cruelty and barbaric ruthlessness.
Nearly seven decades later, the memory of that horror is increasingly in jeopardy. More and more people seek to use the Holocaust in ways that dilute its ultimate meaning. Indeed, the calamity suffered by the Jewish people, who lost one-third of their ranks in the flames of Hitler’s hatred, is increasingly being pushed aside to make room for a broader-based, more “universalist” message. This cannot be allowed to happen. However well-intentioned the effort might be, we must not permit the lessons of the Holocaust to become garbled for the sake of promoting any particular agenda.
Sadly, a prime example of this approach is to be found in many of the commemorations that are being held this week as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 to serve as an annual day of memorial for the victims of the Nazis. Each year, events and ceremonies are held around the world with the support and participation of governments and civic groups. Many of these gatherings rightly stress the unique suffering that was inflicted on the Jewish people. But others seem to veer off course, virtually snubbing the victims in their eagerness to battle various forms of modern-day bigotry.
Take, for instance, Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, which is being held this year under the motto of “Speak up, Speak out.” It is organized by a group called the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), which the British government set up and funds. Incredibly, on the HMDT homepage, there is no mention of the word “Jew” in reference to the Holocaust. It requires a bit of patience, and several acts of mouse-clicking, just to find materials that explain what the Jewish people endured. The site encourages people to sign a pledge toward “ending the language of hatred” which references the Holocaust alongside “genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur,” as though it were just one of many. The result, of course, is that those who are not well-versed in history might very well come away thinking that there was nothing exceptional about Jewish suffering.
Similarly, the United Nations has also fallen prey to this kind of approach. Recently, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited a synagogue in New York, where he said, “The United Nations attaches great importance not only to this single day of remembrance, but to our work throughout the year to educate the world about the universal lessons of the Holocaust.” “The Holocaust,” he said, “affected so many different groups, and so many professions, that it is vital to reach new audiences with this history.”
To be sure, the “universal lessons” of the Holocaust are worth disseminating. But what about the distinctive lessons as well? The Holocaust was first and foremost an attempt by Germany and its collaborators to annihilate the Jewish people. It highlighted the vulnerability of Jewish life in exile and the danger that rampant anti-Semitism poses when it infects the masses. This simple truth cannot be allowed to become muddied, minimized or overlooked.…
CAN THERE BE A SECOND HOLOCAUST?
Robert S. Wistrich
Jerusalem Post, January 26, 2012
In recent years, the Holocaust has been subject to an increasingly sickening blend of ruthless politicization, deliberate distortion, crass commercialization and an often abject sentimentalism. More ominously, it has also become a weapon of choice for many of Israel’s worst enemies and for a resurgent anti-Semitism which brands the entire enterprise of Holocaust memory as nothing but a “Zionist plot.”
In contemporary Europe, Holocaust guilt is used more often than not to promote the Palestinian cause rather than to recognize the necessity of having a Jewish state. Arab and Islamist propaganda, aided and abetted by many liberals and leftists (including some vocal Jewish anti- Zionists), hammers away at the grotesque libel that Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are worse than those of the Nazis. Many Europeans believe these fables. In Israel itself, there are even academics who trumpet such absurdities which have become all-too-commonplace on certain campuses abroad, especially in Britain, North America and Scandinavia.
This systematic degradation of the Holocaust has many causes as well as consequences that must give us pause. It has been accompanied by an ignominious competition for the mantle of ultimate victim-hood that exudes a perverse resentment at the fact that Jews have allegedly “monopolized” the martyr’s crown of suffering and pain. Efforts to elevate the Palestinian Nakba to equal status with the Shoah are only the latest in a long line of such gross distortions.
Some years ago, the Hungarian Nobel Prize Laureate Imre Kertész analyzed the negative reactions to any reminder of Jewish sufferings. In 1998, he caustically observed that “the anti-Semite of our age no longer loathes Jews; he wants Auschwitz.”
This fact has not, however, prevented some…intellectuals from…demanding that we abandon any engagement with Holocaust memory or universalize it out of existence.… There has been a notable shift over the past 20 years to searching for almost any light at the end of the Holocaust tunnel, some kind of a happy ending or emotionally uplifting stories about human brotherhood, altruistic rescuers and easily digestible universal moral lessons to be drawn from this tragic history. This trend may be humanly all-too-understandable but it ultimately involves a dangerously naïve level of escapism with regard to the bi-millennial Christian European Jew-hatred that made the Holocaust possible in the first place.
Worse still, it diverts us away from the nightmarish but not inconceivable possibility that nearly six million Israeli Jews (as well as many Muslim Arabs) could be destroyed by a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of Iran or one of its proxies. In other words, there could indeed be a second Holocaust.…
In [the Iranians’] bizarre perspective, obtaining nuclear weapons may well accelerate the coming of the Mahdi (the Islamic Messiah). This is the dark cloud that hangs over International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2012, and it is not likely to go away.
(Robert Wistrich is the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center
for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)
DÉJÀ JEW
Aaron D. Rubinger
Jerusalem Magazine, January 22, 2012
The term déjà vu brings to mind the English expression, been there, done that. The odd sensation of reliving something for the second time unnerves us precisely because it’s so convincingly familiar.
Over the course of 2 months, I visited Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK and interviewed dozens of Jewish leaders as well as “laymen”—both Jews and non-Jews. While attempting to determine the seriousness of contemporary European Anti-Semitism, I experienced what I would term “déjà Jew”—the peculiar sense that we, the members of Jewish people, are reliving an experience from the past.…
From the mid-1930s to early 1940s, Jews who recognized that they were no longer safe in Europe anxiously sought refuge abroad. Sylvain Zenouda, the co-founder and current vice president of the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l’Antisèmitism—an organization which monitors and documents anti-Semitism in France—told me that educated young Jews in France with the financial means to do so have either fled the country or are making plans to flee.
Eighty years ago, our people were being verbally abused and brutally assaulted in public places. And now it seems to be happening all over again. Viviane Teitelbaum, a minister in the Brussels Regional Parliament, related an incident that occurred this past November involving a 13-year old Jewish girl in Brussels. The girl was brutally assaulted at her school, resulting in her hospitalization for multiple injuries including a concussion. The attackers were not members of the Third Reich’s SS, but a group of female Muslim students at the same school. The ringleader pronounced her to be a “filthy Jew.” Apparently, in the weeks prior to the attack, the girl’s father had approached the authorities and the school with complaints that there had been threats made by fellow classmates against his daughter. Upon hearing that his concerns were simply brushed aside, I immediately thought of Yogi Berra’s famous gaff: “This is like déjà vu all over again!…”
In an interview conducted in November, a Parisian mother related how the fear of being physically attacked by Muslim extremists means that it is “not rare at all today” for French Jewish students to attempt to pass themselves off as Muslim—with some even going as far as to fast on Ramadan. One case in point was a Jewish girl of North African descent who for years was successful in this deception, until finally she was “exposed” when Muslim girls caught her eating matzah in the bathroom during Pesah. After her classmates beat her viciously, they invited their male Muslim friends to their school to participate in a gang rape.… Didn’t this happen to us already?
In a perverse twist, historically, such horrific violence against Jews has often been blamed on the alleged “crimes” of the victims themselves. This was particularly true of the pre- and post-Holocaust era. Yet the remarks of the current US Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, seems to indicate that not much has changed in that regard. Gutman explains away the irrational hatred of Jews by Muslims in Europe as an outcome of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.…
Gutman’s remarks did not stem so much from malice as naïveté. Like the administration he represents, Gutman sadly suffers from another disorder, not déjà vu this time, but its opposite—jamais vu, or the illusion of the familiar being encountered for the first time. It is when that which should be familiar—in this case long standing Muslim hostility towards Jews and a Jewish State—is thought to be a novel development created only after June 1967. Such memory impairment and historical “misfacts”—especially when applied to areas like foreign policy—constitutes an extremely dangerous disorder that can have dire repercussions.
In the precursory period to the Holocaust, no one knew how bad things might get; the eternal hope was that things couldn’t possibly get worse. While enabling some with the strength to endure, such wishful yearnings ultimately proved tragically fatal. Likewise, in Europe today, to borrow Al Jolson’s words, we just “ain’t seen nothing yet.” In another interview with the president of France-Israel Association, Gilles-William Goldnadel asserted that if there will be a new provocation by the Arabs against Israel, with Israel subsequently defending itself, not only will huge demonstrations in Paris and other European capitals be inevitable, they will also likely be accompanied by en masse “organized physical violence.”
Joël Rubinfeld, the well-liked former-president of the Comité de Coordination des Organisations Juives de Belgique, echoes the above sentiment and suspects that in Belgium too “there is definitely a potential of physical violence coming against Jews.” He recalls an anti-Israel demonstration in Antwerp in April 2002 that was organized by the European-Arab League in which the throngs were shouting “Death to the Jews.…”
Yet, just as there existed righteous gentiles during the Nazi era whose courage and moral decency led them to risk their lives in the battle against anti-Semitism, so too do there exist equally brave non-Jewish individuals today. One such person is Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris who, when asked on a televised debate to publicly acknowledge the reality of a “Palestinian Holocaust,” responded by saying: “It is surely the strangest holocaust in human history when, during the so-called period of ‘genocide,’ the population of a people so dramatically increases.” As a result of his steadfast defense of Israel, Millière is perpetually the recipient of death threats.…
Anti-Semitism in the world is as real now as it was in the 30s and 40s; the lust for Jewish blood by our enemies is as ravenous today as it has ever been; even “passive” Europeans are, once again, the silent collaborators. However, today we thankfully have a State of Israel in which Jews from the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Sweden, the UK and elsewhere will always be welcomed. Perhaps then, it’s time to say goodbye to “déjà-Jew.”
THE HEROINES OF AUSCHWITZ
Bernie M. Farber
National Post, January 27, 2012
On Jan. 27, 1945, 67 years ago today, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. From 1942 to late 1944, the concentration camp became the center of the wholesale murder of European Jewry. There were others—Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, to name just a few. But it was Auschwitz that was to become the archetype of genocide. The gas chambers of Auschwitz took the lives of an estimated 1.1 million people, almost a million of them Jews.
Yet within Auschwitz’s horror there were unique acts of bravery from which we must always take heart. The courage of Anna (Wajcblum) Heilman and the women of the Auschwitz munitions factory is one such story.
Anna was born to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland on Dec. 1, 1928. Her childhood ended in September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, where overcrowding, starvation and disease killed many awaiting deportation to the death camps. In 1943, the remnants of Jews trapped in the ghetto fought back to no avail; amongst them were 14-year old Anna and her older sister Ester.…
Anna, Ester and their parents originally were sent to the camp of Majdanek, where Anna’s parents were gassed upon arrival. Anna and Ester then were transported to Auschwitz to work as slave laborers at a munitions factory.
By mid 1944, the inmates knew that Germany was losing the war. Believing they would die anyway, Anna and her friends wanted to find a way to fight back, to give their deaths meaning. Ester, Anna, and a few other female prisoners began to smuggle gunpowder from the factory, a tiny amount at a time, hidden in their kerchiefs or sleeves. Being caught meant instant execution.
The young women gave the smuggled gunpowder to a young Polish Jew named Rosa Robota, who in turn passed it on to the Sonderkommando, a detail of Jewish male slave crematoria workers.… On Oct. 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando revolted, attacking the SS with stones, axes and homemade grenades produced from the smuggled gunpowder. Several SS were killed. One of the four crematoria was severely damaged by the improvised explosives. It was never used again, saving many lives. The Sonderkommando were all killed.
The SS traced the gunpowder back to the munitions plant. Anna’s sister Ester and three other young women, Ala Gertner, Rosa Robota and Regina Safirstajn, were tortured for months by the SS. But they gave up only the names of the Sonderkommando, who were already dead. They did not betray Anna or the others involved.
The four young women were hanged as saboteurs in January 1945, less than two weeks before the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz. In a smuggled note she wrote shortly before her execution, Ester asked her friend Marta Bindiger to look after Anna. Marta kept Anna going on the 700 km westward death march to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. Prisoners who faltered or fell were immediately shot.
Anna and Marta were liberated by the Soviet army in May, 1945. Emigrating to Israel a short time later, Anna married another survivor, Josh Heilman, and eventually moved to Ottawa, where Anna became a social worker with the Children’s Aid Society.… Encouraged by Marta, Anna worked hard to get recognition for the sacrifice and heroism of her sister and the three other young women. In 1991, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, dedicated a monument to the “Four Martyred Heroines of Auschwitz.” Working with her son-in-law, Anna developed her diary into a book titled Never Far Away. It won the 2002 City of Ottawa Book Award.
Anna Heilman…returned with groups of young students to Auschwitz several times through a Holocaust-education program called “The March of the Living.…” This heroine of Auschwitz died on May 1, 2011, aged 82. On this day above all others, her story is worth remembering—a rare and uplifting tale of survival from the very heart of the Nazis’ kingdom of death.
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT: ANSWERING SPIELBERG’S ‘MUNICH’
David Suissa & Mitch and Elliot Julis
Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2012
There is a scene at the end of Steven Spielberg’s controversial 2005 film, Munich, that disappointed a lot of Israel’s supporters. Spielberg’s camera caresses the dramatic Manhattan skyline, pans over the East River and ends hauntingly at the Twin Towers, which were still standing at the time of the film’s events. The reason many of us were disappointed with that ending was the strong implication that Israel’s relentless drive to avenge the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre had something to do with the subsequent 9/11 terrorist attacks.
What is fascinating about that downbeat Hollywood ending is that, many years later, close to where those Twin Towers once stood, reality wrote a much happier ending. That ending—or, more accurately, that beginning—was written last month when it was announced that Technion-Israel Institute of Technology had won a global competition to partner with Cornell University and New York City to create an international hi-tech learning center, to be called the Technion-Cornell Institute of Innovation (TCII).
The multibillion-dollar project will attract top scientific minds from around the world and tackle the planet’s toughest problems. It will be located on Roosevelt Island in the East River, the same river over which Spielberg’s camera panned before stopping at that haunting shot of the Twin Towers. It will ultimately encompass 2.1 million square feet, with space for 2,500 students and 280 professors.… Little did Spielberg know that a few years after shooting Munich, which focused on Israel as the brutal avenger, the world would see such a dramatic depiction of another Israel—the tiny Israel of big ideas that can change the world. This is the cruel paradox of the Israel story: A country that is forced to use its wits to defend itself but would much prefer using its wits to save the world.
Spielberg himself tried to capture that paradox in his film. Mossad agents struggle with conflicting loyalties to their country, their own families and their self-image. How high a price are they willing to pay to avenge the blood of their compatriots? The erosion of their soul? The loss of family connection? The loss of humanity? This painful and ongoing Israeli dilemma can easily get lost in the round-the-clock media coverage of targeted bombings and terrorist checkpoints. The inner yearning to create is never as visible as the outer imperative to fight your enemies. Bombs falling make for great television.
That is why this new center of innovation is so noteworthy. It will be visible. As visible as those Patriot missiles that Israel deploys to catch incoming terrorist missiles. As visible as tank formations that enter Gaza or Lebanon. This new center won’t be just a book in Barnes & Noble called Start-up Nation. It will be an enormous monument of human accomplishment, like the Statue of Liberty, with Israel’s name on it.
It will be the ultimate human response to an act of ultimate destruction. Near where the Twin Towers were destroyed, a “Silicon Island” of applied sciences will rise on Roosevelt Island that will aim even higher than those towers ever did. Here, humans won’t just trade, they will create. They won’t just build businesses, they will build solutions to better the world.…
