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  • Remembering Auschwitz

    Trinidad & Tobago Express, Trinidad and Tobago -
    Jan 28, 2005

    Remembering Auschwitz

    Our Opinion


    While we know that some citizens will remember events and understand
    the significance of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
    Auschwitz, observed, we point out, and not celebrated, this past
    week, we are also certain that many of today's generation may be
    unaware of Auschwitz and what it means.

    Some will not even be aware of the enormity of the horror of the
    Holocaust. It was the industrialised murder of a people employing
    many technicians of death at the instigation of a psychopath and his
    circle-it was genocide, the product of totalitarianism, of some very
    demented people, and widespread European anti-Semitism.

    Auschwitz was a death camp in Poland, a place to which human beings
    from different parts of Europe were transported in cattle cars and
    systematically murdered in mass gassings of men, women, children,
    infants and babies, simply for being Jewish.

    The 20th century saw two major conflicts. The second, World War II,
    killed about 50 million people, the majority being innocent
    civilians. Warfare is as old as the first civilisations millennia ago
    but genocide, as far as we can see, is a relatively recent
    phenomenon. The dividing line between legitimate warfare in defence
    of a people's or a nation's boundaries or space and the systematic
    elimination of a people is vague. Peoples have always collectively
    suffered at the hands of others, whether by conquest, enslavement,
    occupation or in conventional or legitimate warfare, their suffering,
    injury and deaths now euphemistically called collateral damage.

    Genocide, however, is different. It is an attempt to destroy another
    people. In the past century there were the noted examples of the
    expulsion of the Herrero people into the deserts of Namibia and
    similar treatment of the Armenians by the Turks. Citizens may recall
    the massacres of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the slaughter in
    Rwanda in Africa, as well as the victims of Shabra and Shatila,
    Palestinian refugee camps, and Srebenica, a Bosnian UN declared safe
    city, and the current conflict in Darfur, described by Colin Powell
    as genocide. These killings were all directed at recognisable ethnic
    groups.

    The Holocaust however was different in more than one way. The sheer
    numbers are probably beyond the comprehension of most readers. It
    consumed six million souls. Its methodology singled it out. It
    consisted of the systematic serial collection of Jewish nationals of
    several European countries, their transportation to purpose-built
    facilities designed to kill human beings en mass, after either
    enslaving them in factories or simply stripping them of their pitiful
    material possessions and even their hair, and removal of gold teeth
    after gassing them.

    At Auschwitz over 1.5 million, mainly Jews, were so murdered, with
    the daily tally often rising to two or more thousands. What also
    singles it out is that the mass murder was not civil or internecine
    warfare within a state but rather the actions of a state beyond its
    boundaries, a state born of elections. No one can deny that mass
    murder on this scale had not been carried out by large numbers of
    compliant individuals.

    Citizens by now may not be aware of the one side effect of
    anti-Semitism on our history. Several Jewish families from Germany
    and Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia fled even to places such as
    Trinidad with nothing more than their humanity, culture and what they
    could carry and made new lives for themselves and families. One such
    family name is Stecher, with which most are familiar. The Express
    reminds its readers of Auschwitz and the tragedy of European Jewry
    and joins with the rest of the world in observing the 60th
    anniversary of the horror of genocide. A lesson for all.
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