The Erosion of Holocaust Memory: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, May 5, 2016— My grandparents and many members of my family were exterminated by the Nazis.
The Holocaust: Many Villains, Few Heroes: Alan M. Dershowitz, Gatestone Institute, May 2, 2016— As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, at which selected Nazi leaders were placed in the dock, we must ask some disturbing questions about those who were never tried for their complicity in the world's worst genocide.
‘Never Forget,’ the World Said of the Holocaust. But the World is Forgetting.: Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, May 1, 2016— Long before the Holocaust had run its course, there was already a desperate urge to keep it from being forgotten.
The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Holocaust Distortion: Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2016— During the past month I have written about a rash of neo-fascist and anti-Semitic incidents which recently took place in Croatia, where the accepted narrative of World War II and the Holocaust have come under heavy attack from ultra-nationalists and revisionists.
Israel Air Force Ceremony – F-15 Jets Over Auschwitz: IDF, Apr. 20, 2016
Jews Died at Auschwitz Because of Anti-Semitism, but Anti-Semitism Did Not Die There: Irwin Cotler, National Post, May 5, 2016
The Holocaust: A Tool for Abuse and Distortion: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, May 4, 2016
Is Germany Really Honoring the Memory of the Holocaust?: Gabriel Fuchs, Algemeiner, May 2, 2016
THE EROSION OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY
Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking, May 5, 2016
My grandparents and many members of my family were exterminated by the Nazis. I would probably also have perished had my parents not had the foresight of leaving Antwerp when I was a young infant on what was probably the last boat to sail to Australia before the outbreak of war. Like survivors, those of us whose families were murdered by the Nazis retain the memory of the Holocaust as part of our DNA. Indeed, in most cases this also applies to our children, who share the sensitivities of their parents.
But today, 70 years later, for our grandchildren, most of whom were deprived of the opportunity of hearing their families agonize over memories, the relevance of the Holocaust will fade unless there is a conscious effort to convey it within the framework of their history. The extent to which Holocaust commemoration is maintained by future Jewish generations will largely be determined by the educational approach and curriculum provided in the Israeli school system.
We should be under no illusions. The so-called Holocaust commemoration in Europe and other Western countries is a sham. In most cases it trivializes the Holocaust by linking it to other mass murders. In fact, commemoration has become so broad and universal that the words “Jew” and “anti-Semitism” are not even mentioned in the European Union’s lengthy call to its constituents to engage in Holocaust remembrance.
If Holocaust awareness truly existed, it would have been inconceivable for the current anti-Semitic tsunami to have swept through the continent of Europe, which was soaked with the blood of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. In fact, a survey of adults in 101 countries reveals that only 54% had ever heard of the Holocaust, and a large proportion of these considered it a myth. With the actual number of survivors dramatically diminishing, Holocaust deniers have proliferated and indeed today there is a growing campaign, spearheaded by Islamic anti-Semites, promoting Holocaust denial.
As Jews, I believe that it is our obligation to ensure that this dark chapter of our history is commemorated and studied by future Jewish generations. This is not merely to honor our martyrs but to appreciate the contrast between the Jewish people today, which, with the revival of nationhood, can defend itself, and the powerlessness of those dark years when the world stood by as we were being murdered. If we follow the double standards and bias currently leveled against us, particularly at the United Nations, often with the support or indifference of the Europeans, we must appreciate how fortunate we are today that we are able to rely on our own defenses.
There are some, including far-left Israelis, who seek to scale down or even cancel Holocaust commemoration within Israel on the spurious grounds that it is exploited to create an environment of Jewish victimhood and as a means of extorting money and political favors from European countries. This would be disastrous because it is imperative that future generations understand what happened to their European ancestors and realize that the state in which they live cannot be taken for granted. As we commemorate our Exodus from Egyptian slavery to freedom, so we are obliged to remind ourselves how, after 2,000 years of exile and immediately in the wake of the most barbaric genocide, we revived Jewish nationhood in the State of Israel.
My grandson returned a few weeks ago from his school’s journey to the Polish death camps. Even though his family was already sensitive to the Holocaust, the visit had a profound impact on him. I was therefore deeply saddened to read that the principal of Tel Aviv’s prestigious elite secular Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, Dr. Zeev Dagani, proposes canceling annual trips to the Nazi death camps. He claims that “there are many youth who are not emotionally built to grasp the reality of the horror. It is too much for them and I think it is too early to send 16- and 17-year-olds to trips to Poland. It is a trip which requires emotional and intellectual maturity.”
The reality is that if adequate education is provided and the tours are led by well-informed guides, the results have proven to be extraordinary and have major beneficial impact on the participants, not only in terms of comprehending the Holocaust, but equally so in relation to their understanding and appreciation of the Jewish state. There is a valid complaint that the escalating costs prevent some students from participating. This is something the government should be reviewing with the aim of providing subsidies to enable all students who wish to participate. It would prove to be a worthwhile long-term educational investment.
Of course, it is sickening to hear of occasional groups visiting a death camp and engaging in drinking parties in the evening or interspersing their visit with a shopping day in Warsaw. Under such circumstances, it would undoubtedly be preferable to cancel such trips. But most trips are well-planned and have immense educational impact, highlighting the emergence of a Jewish state like a phoenix from the ashes of the Holocaust – something that no classroom study course can replicate…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE HOLOCAUST: MANY VILLAINS, FEW HEROES
Alan M. Dershowitz
Gatestone Institute, May 2, 2016
As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, at which selected Nazi leaders were placed in the dock, we must ask some disturbing questions about those who were never tried for their complicity in the world's worst genocide. It would have been impossible to carry out the mass murder of so many people without the complicity of so many governments, groups, and individuals. Perhaps there were too many guilty parties to put them all on trial, but it is not too late to hold the guilty morally accountable for what they did and failed to do.
To be sure, the guiltiest individuals were the Nazi leaders who directly planned and implemented the final solution. Their goal was to in gather Jews from all over the world in order to kill them and to destroy what they regarded as the "Jewish race". They came very close to succeeding, wiping out nearly all of Europe's Jews in a relatively brief period of time. These Nazi leaders had the help of many "willing executioners," both in Germany and in the countries under its control. Among the worst culprits were individual Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, and others. There were some heroes among these groups and they are justly remembered and honored. But the number of villains far exceeded the number of heroes.
Then there were the guilty governments that cooperated and helped facilitate the deportations and round-ups. The French government deported more Jews than the Nazis demanded. Other governments, including those of Norway, Holland, Hungary and Austria (which had become part of Nazi Germany), also helped the Nazis achieve their genocidal goal. Bulgaria, on the other hand, declined to cooperate with the Nazi genocide, and its small Jewish population were saved. Denmark too rescued its Jews, many of whom were ferried to neutral Sweden.
There were also the countries that refused to accept Jews who might have escaped the Nazis had they been permitted to enter. These countries include the United States, Canada, and many other potential places of asylum that shut their doors. In the United States and Canada too, there were heroes who pressed their leaders to do more, but for the most part they failed. Many Arab and Muslim leaders also played ignoble roles, siding with the Nazis and conducting their own pogroms against local Jews. The leading villain in this regard was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who joined Hitler in Berlin and played a hands-on role in sending Jews to their deaths and in keeping the doors of Palestine closed to Jewish refugees.
Could more have been done by Britain and the United States to end the genocide? Could they have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz and other death camps? These are complex questions that have been asked but not satisfactorily answered since 1945. There were also the actions of those who pardoned and commuted the sentences of Nazis convicted at Nuremberg, and those who helped Nazis escape prosecution after the war ended. That list too is long and disturbing.
The Nuremberg trials, by focusing narrowly on Nazi leaders and their direct henchmen, implicitly exculpated those who played important, but less direct, roles by their actions and inaction. By their nature, courts are limited in what they can do to bring to justice large numbers of individuals who belong on a wide continuum of legal and moral guilt. But historians, philosophers, jurists and ordinary citizens are not so limited. We may point fingers of blame at all who deserve to be blamed, whether or not they were placed on trial at Nuremberg, or at subsequent legal proceedings.
There will never be perfect justice for those who helped carry out the Holocaust. Most of the guilty escaped prosecution, lived happy lives and died in their beds, surrounded by loving family members. West Germany prospered as a result of the Marshall Plan, and many German industrialists, who had benefited from slave labor, continued to benefit as a result of the perceived needs of the Cold War. The scales of justice remain out of balance. Perhaps this helps to explain why more than 6 million people have been murdered in preventable genocides — in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and other places — since the world pledged "never again." There is, of course, the risk that by blaming all, we blame none. It is important to calibrate the responsibility of those who played very different roles in the Holocaust. This is a daunting task, but it must be undertaken if future genocides are to be deterred.
‘NEVER FORGET,’ THE WORLD SAID OF THE HOLOCAUST.
Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe, May 1, 2016
Long before the Holocaust had run its course, there was already a desperate urge to keep it from being forgotten. In hiding and on the run, amid the shadows of gas chambers and the smoke of crematoria, Jews frantically sought ways to bear witness to the enormities of the Nazis. Surrounded by horror, anticipating their own deaths, they appealed to the future: Remember. In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, Elie Wiesel recalled the eminent historian Simon Dubnow, who over and over implored his fellow inhabitants in the Riga ghetto: “Yiddin, schreibt un farschreibt” — “Jews, write it all down.”
Many felt an overpowering need to preserve the truth. “Countless victims became chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps,” said Wiesel. “[They] left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished.” And when the war was over and the mind-boggling scope of the Final Solution was fully grasped — the Germans and their collaborators had annihilated 6 million Jews from every corner of Europe, wiping out more than one-third of the world’s Jewish population — the moral imperative to remember grew even more intense.
Judaism has always attached intense significance to remembrance; in multiple passages the Hebrew Bible even makes it an explicit religious obligation. Not surprisingly, Israel’s parliament long ago added Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the Jewish calendar each spring. (It begins this year on Wednesday evening.) For many Holocaust survivors and their children, “Never Forget” understandably became almost an 11th Commandment.
But a commitment to remembrance spread far beyond the community of those most affected by the Nazis’ industrial-scale campaign to eradicate the Jews. In recent decades, Holocaust commemoration, particularly in the West, became a widespread cultural phenomenon. Countless books, lectures, and documentaries have been devoted to the topic. Academia is replete with Holocaust studies programs. On big and small screen alike, movies and miniseries on Holocaust themes have been runaway successes. Online resources for learning about the Holocaust are almost too numerous to count. And Holocaust memorials and museums have been erected in cities large and small, on every continent except Antarctica.
The Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry, an evil so unprecedented that the word “genocide” had to be coined to describe it, is among the most exhaustively researched, documented, and memorialized crimes of the 20th century. The powerful Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, who in 1943 characterized the wholesale murder of the Jews, by then well underway, as “a glorious page in our history that . . . shall never be written,” was wrong. The history was written. Its remembrance is sustained by an ocean of scholarship, testimony, literature, and education. The last living survivors of the Holocaust are now mostly in their 80s or 90s. In a few years almost no one will be left to speak from personal experience of what it meant to be engulfed in the singular horror of the Shoah.
But the survivors have at least this reassurance: What happened to them will not be forgotten. Or will it? The events of the Holocaust have haunted me for as long as I can remember. My father, who was born in a tiny village on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border in 1925, is a survivor of Hitler’s destruction. With his parents and four of his brothers and sisters, he was seized by the Nazis in the spring of 1944, imprisoned in a crowded ghetto, and then, after six weeks, herded into a cattle car to be transported to Auschwitz. Of the seven members of his immediate family who entered the death camp, six were murdered. Only my father escaped death.
For me, the Holocaust has always been intensely personal. It may have ended a decade and a half before I was born, but I have always understood that I was intended for obliteration too. In a Reichstag address in 1939, Hitler had vowed to achieve “the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.” The essence of the Final Solution is that it was to be final. No Jews were to survive — above all, no Jewish children through whom 3,000 years of Jewish existence might continue. It was to that end that Germany constructed such a vast continent-wide operation and committed such immense financial resources: to track down and murder every last Jew in Europe.
Never before had a world power, deranged by anti-Semitism, made the eradication of an entire people its central aim, or gone to such exhaustive extremes to achieve it. That is what makes the Holocaust so grotesquely, terrifyingly unique. The unexampled virulence of anti-Semitism, a hatred older than and different from any other in human history, is at the heart of what the Holocaust is about — that, and the role of the Jews as the canary in the mine of civilization. When a society fills with toxic moral fumes, Jews become the target of bigotry and terror. But rarely does it end with them. Hitler set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was in flames…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE TIP OF A HUGE ICEBERG OF HOLOCAUST DISTORTION
Efraim Zuroff
Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2016
During the past month I have written about a rash of neo-fascist and anti-Semitic incidents which recently took place in Croatia, where the accepted narrative of World War II and the Holocaust have come under heavy attack from ultra-nationalists and revisionists. In the wake of those articles and a visit to Zagreb by Nicholas Dean, the US State Department’s envoy on Holocaust issues, who met with both Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic and Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic, the former issued a statement to the effect that the Ustasha government which ruled Croatia during the years 1941- 1945 was a criminal regime, while the latter spoke in general terms criticizing totalitarianism.
If anyone hoped that these two declarations would dampen the enthusiasm of Croatia’s neo-fascists, they were sadly disappointed as less than two weeks ago, at the official state ceremony commemorating the victims at Jasenovac, the largest and most notorious of the concentration camps established by the Ustasha regime, which was nicknamed “The Auschwitz of the Balkans,” a new low was reached in terms of Holocaust commemoration. On the direct intervention of Natasha Jovicic, the director of the memorial complex, who also serves as a special adviser to the president on Holocaust issues, notorious Ustasha supporters from the Croatian National Platform were allowed to lay a wreath in memory of “all the victims of the camp from 1941 until 1951.”
The practical implication of this outrage was to legitimize the myth propagated by the Ustasha apologists that the postwar Communist regime turned Jasenovac after its liberation in April 1945 into a death camp where innocent people were murdered, thereby creating a false symmetry between Ustasha and Communist crimes. (The local Serb and Jewish communities, as well as the organized opponents of fascism, had justly refused to attend this official state ceremony to protest the failure of the government to stem the resurgence of neo-fascism and Ustasha nostalgia, and therefore were not present, and could not have prevented this outrage.) The problematic events in Croatia are only the tip of a huge iceberg of Holocaust distortion which is spreading throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe. An important part of the explanation for this dangerous phenomenon has to do with the history of the area during the Holocaust. While the Nazis sought and succeeded to enlist local collaborators in every country they occupied, as well as in those allied with them, only in Eastern Europe did collaboration with the Nazis include active participation in mass murder.
Thus while the Nazis’ helpers elsewhere actively assisted in the implementation of the initial stages of the Final Solution (definition: Aryanization of property and valuables, concentration and deportation), these collaborators were not the ones who committed the murders. They were accessories to murder, having sent Jews to be annihilated in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In countries like Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus, local collaborators were integrated into the mechanism of the mass murder of the Jews. This historical fact is one of the main reasons why these countries find it so difficult to tell, teach and write the truth about World War II and the Shoa. Another reason is their oppression under the Communists and their desire to obtain recognition and compensation for their suffering.
In that regard, the success achieved on behalf of Holocaust survivors is a source of envy, and one which these countries seek, unsuccessfully until now, to replicate. These two factors are the main themes of the attempts to rewrite the accepted narrative of World War II and the Holocaust – to minimize or hide the crimes of local perpetrators and to promote the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. They find practical expression in the Prague Declaration of June 3, 2008, which calls for a rewriting of European textbooks to reflect the supposed historical equivalency between the crimes of the two totalitarian regimes, the establishment of a European Institute of Memory and Conscience which would serve as a museum/memorial and research center along the lines of Yad Vashem, and a joint memorial day for all the victims of totalitarian regimes to be observed on August 23, the day that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression pact.
Needless to say, the adoption of any of these demands would seriously undermine the hereto accepted perception of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and the singular fate of Jews under the Third Reich.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the views expressed in the Prague Declaration were fairly strong in Eastern Europe, but they were not so actively promoted, for fear that they might negatively affect these countries’ chances of obtaining entry to the European Union and NATO. Once that goal was achieved, however, all restraint in this regard disappeared and now the revisionist agenda is being pursued with vigor.
I wish I could say that the EU, the US, Canada and Israel were taking the necessary steps to prevent the revised version of history being promoted in Eastern Europe from being accepted, but unfortunately virtually nothing has been done. A variety of political and economic interests have combined to prevent any effective action and in the meantime, an entire generation of Eastern Europeans has grown up virtually ignorant of the Holocaust crimes of their own countrymen and convinced that Communist crimes (which in Eastern Europe are out of all proportion to reality – and blamed on Jews) were just as bad as those of the Nazis. Holocaust Remembrance Day is another good opportunity for a wake-up call in this regard.
Israel Air Force Ceremony – F-15 Jets Over Auschwitz: IDF, Apr. 20, 2016—"Triumph of the Return" – On September 4, 2003, in a large ceremony, the Israeli Air Force flew three f-15 jets over the Auschwitz concentration camp in a show of the Jewish people's continued strength and triumph over past adversities.
Jews Died at Auschwitz Because of Anti-Semitism, but Anti-Semitism Did Not Die There: Irwin Cotler, National Post, May 5, 2016—I write at a historic moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and warning. For we are on the eve of two historic anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the coming into effect of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which served as prologue and precursor to the Holocaust; and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials — which served as the foundation for the development of contemporary international human rights and humanitarian law.
The Holocaust: A Tool for Abuse and Distortion: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, May 4, 2016—Historical events usually fade with time. Not so the Holocaust and related issues, which are increasingly appearing in the public domain. In previous years, one annual summary was sufficient for a fairly complete overview of Holocaust-related issues. However, last year the selection was so great that I had to limit myself to several issues from the main categories.
Is Germany Really Honoring the Memory of the Holocaust?: Gabriel Fuchs, Algemeiner, May 2, 2016—In one episode of the TV show Band of Brothers, the liberation of a concentration camp is intensely portrayed. The camp in question was situated just outside the town of Landsberg am Lech, along with another 10 concentration camps.
