Nature never loses its taste for dry irony. As the civilised world concluded International Holocaust Day activities for another year, we learned of the passing of one the Shoa’s best-known, best-loved survivors.
It is said that as fewer and fewer first-hand witnesses of the Nazi atrocities survive, it will become harder and harder to compel ‘Holocaust deniers’ to tell the truth. Halter’s fine paintings at the Imperial War Museum may bear testimony to the truth but can people be forced to believe it?
On Holocaust Day itself, the Daily Telegraph published a piece by the Jewish Chronicle’s Jennifer Lipman: ‘What School Textbooks Can't Tell You About The Holocaust’.
Informative but unremarkable in itself, what frightened the hell out of me was that only three anonymous readers’ comments were published below the article before being closed to more by D.T. moderators.
The reason is clear. As may be seen by my re-print (below), not only did all three detract and diminish the Holocaust to a ridiculous degree, they all received an inordinate amount of support – from 321 persons unknown.
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dickgreendoxon
There were surely a great many Nazis who committed no atrocities.........and probably a majority of the party membership had no involvement in the Holocaust. And weren't many non-Nazis.....eg French collaborators....actively involved in the extermination of the Jews?
So what's wrong with a guy wearing a (rather smart) Nazi uniform at a party.....or a Mao cap.....or whatever? - “
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HugoandFreddie
The Holocaust is an unfortunate episode in what is man's bloody and cruel past. It of itself is no more worthy of history's attention than the Cambodian holocaust or the Uwandan holocaust or some of the holocausts committed by the Crusades on Muslims in the Holy Land.
For me a far worse holocaust occurred during the second world war. Over 20 million Russians (civilians) died on the Finnish peninsular, many left to freeze to death.
davejon
You are missing the point
(Edited by a moderator)
Heaven knows what ‘davejon’ had written originally but let us be grateful that for once, D.T. moderators acted swiftly and sensibly.
But there is more: This week I heard another true story of total Holocaust denial. It appears that a group of Muslim Lancashire taxi drivers not only blame ‘the Jews’ when business is bad, they also pointedly refuse to admit that the Holocaust ever happened – even when shown documentary and pictorial proof. This, confirmed the story-teller, is because they are inculcated with anti-Jewish sentiment from birth.
No wonder then, that according to the left-wing Israeli newspaper, Haaretz “the total consensus among Israeli Jews is that the 'guiding principle' for the country is 'to remember the Holocaust.”
Correspondent, Merav Michaeli was scathing in his response to the survey and accused Israelis and their leaders of not having dealt with the trauma of the Shoa.
He wrote: “Trauma leads to belligerence and a strong tendency to wreak havoc on one's surroundings, but first and foremost on oneself. What we consider rational is actually a frightened, defensive, aggressive pattern. Our current leaders have made Israeli Judaism just a post-traumatic syndrome, while they lead us to self-destruction.”
But I suggest that Michaeli is quite arrogantly wrong and am sure that he would have a total change of heart if he lived in Europe and so experienced at first-hand the escalation of modern antisemitism to unprecedented, pre-Holocaust levels.
If he or anyone else needs convincing further, I commend them to a film feature in the Monday 30 January online edition of The Independent.
There, Tony Patterson highlights Kriegerin (Combat Girl) a film by German director, David Wnendt, exploring the explosion of neo=Nazi violence in East Germany since the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and all that followed. It appears that women account for at least 20% of neo-Nazi groups.
Patterson concludes: “A report published in the run up to Holocaust Remembrance Day last Friday ... concluded that around one in five Germans held antisemitic views and that the problem was prevalent. The survey also revealed that one in five Germans under 30 did not know what Auschwitz was.”
msniw
1 comment:
Horrifying. This is an excellent article about a problem that needs to be faced.
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