On the 27th January, that is to say tomorrow, it will be exactly 70 years since Ukrainian troops opened the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camps and liberated those inmates who were still alive.
The 70th anniversary of the end of Auschwitz (more than a million people perished behind those infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gates at the behest of the leaders of an educated and cultured people) should remind us that we must remain watchful.
The anal outpourings of certain politicians, those with ambitions to deprive us of our hard worn liberties using some convenient pretext or other, should be constantly sifted for clues as to the real agenda. History has a habit of repeating itself.
The 70th anniversary of the end of Auschwitz (more than a million people perished behind those infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gates at the behest of the leaders of an educated and cultured people) should remind us that we must remain watchful.
The anal outpourings of certain politicians, those with ambitions to deprive us of our hard worn liberties using some convenient pretext or other, should be constantly sifted for clues as to the real agenda. History has a habit of repeating itself.
A few days ago the minute hand on the Weltuntergangsuhr or Doomsday Clock ticked forwards a couple of minutes. The time is now three minutes to midnight.
There's a link to the official Auschwitz website HERE.
The photo (with caption) below shows the Vienna Holocaust Memorial, which in reality is grey, in the city's Judenplatz. Any charred paper effect is my licentia poetica.
The text reads:
This memorial commemorates the 65,000 Viennese Jews who were murdered during the Nazi regime. It was created on the initiative of Simon Wiesenthal (1908 - 2005). The reinforced concrete cube by the British artist Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) represents an introverted, non-accessible library. Countless editions of the apparently same book stand for the large number of victims and their life stories.
My brother was in one of the first groups of British soldiers to enter Belsen - he never ever spoke of it afterwards.
ReplyDeleteMy fother who is 90 this days was also in the British Army (THE jewish brigade) and was sent to Bergn belsn to find some relatives.He found his cousin and brought her to Israel but no one from his familly survived.
DeletePat, I'm not surprised he didn't speak about it again. What a shock he must have had. The word 'Belsen' soon entered schoolboy vernacular, even in Wales, as I well remember from my junior school days in the 1950's when a particularly thin and unhealthy looking boy was cruelly teased.
DeleteYael, your personal story is a lesson to us all. Thank you.
DeleteWe watched the first part of Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Holocaust documentary last night. . The interviews with the farmers who worked in the fields around the camps and knew nothing except seeing the cattle trucks go in with 1000s of people who never came out again and silence were very moving. It went on for four hours.
ReplyDeleteI mean the documentary was four hours and there must be another part to watch this week because I believe in total there are four hours of interviews.
DeleteThanks Rachel. Following up on your comments on the 1985 documentary I found the trailer for the 2013 award winning film 'The Last of the Unjust' on You Tube. It seems to be another one worth looking out for.
ReplyDeleteI was so proud of my daughter when she came home from middle-school yesterday and started asking me questions about Auschwitz and what she had learned in history class. Her English class is reading Lois Lowry's The Giver and her world view of suffering and the potential cruelty of mankind seems to be thoughtfully expanding. Lest we forget...
ReplyDeleteLest we forget . . . Yes, indeed. And that business of forgetting is why Hitler could get away with it. Giving the orders to attack Poland he said: Who remembers the Armenians today? Yes, the world had already chosen to forget the 1.5 million murdered or sent into the desert to die in 1915. And some still like to 'forget'. Forgetting is a convenient euphemism for burying the facts along with the corpses.
DeleteI admit, I had to research the 1915 genocide. Interesting that the Armenian church traces it's roots to the 1st century and Armenia was the first Christian state.
DeleteWhile the world looked away the Venetians gave the Armenians an island in their lagoon which I thought was a nice gesture.
ReplyDelete