Be the light in the darkness
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Last week saw Holocaust Memorial Day, and this Reflection is of that.
On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Union army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Other national armies liberated other camps. These armies all found the horrors of which we are so familiar.
After the discovery of the death camps, General Eisenhower said,
“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened”.
Sadly, prescient words, as some today do insist it never happened.
The Memorial Day is not something locked to the past but a day when we look to the future. This year the theme was ‘Be the light in the darkness’. Encouraging us to reflect not just on the horror but also those people that resisted during and after the genocide.
It’s also a reminder that far-right extremists’, and those of the far-left for that matter, are still around. Just look at what happened in the USA last month.
Ah, but the Holocaust couldn’t happen again, you might say. People would stop it. Well, we didn’t last time. Not everyone who participated in the Holocaust was an ardent Nazi. The majority just went along with the tide. Some out of fear. Most out of indifference. Few felt emboldened enough to stand against it. People like you and me did these things to people like you and me.
How many of us always speak our minds about what we see as an injustice? Most of the time we keep our silence. We don’t want to stand out. Not offend our family, neighbours, colleagues, or friends. We follow the ‘party line’ or corporate policy. We don’t wish to be ‘difficult’. Willing to say things as we see them without fear or favour.
But the Holocaust happened in Germany you might say. Different culture. Severe economic pressures.
Concentration camps are not a Nazi invention. The Spanish first used them to suppress a rebellion against their authority in Cuba in 1896. The USA used them in the Philippines in 1899 to crush an insurrection. The British used them in the Boer War in 1900. These weren’t death camps. But indifference to the occupants along with disease, poor conditions, and malnutrition saw hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Jews wearing a yellow ‘badge’ is nothing new either. As far back as the 1100s in Muslim countries, a requirement of all Jews was to wear a yellow marking. Europe, including England, copied this in the 1200s.
It seems something of the human character to wish to identify those that are different. Be that in looks, belief or custom. Nazi concentration camps weren’t just for Jews. Communists, homosexuals, Catholics, gipsies, and others not seen as pure Aryan met their death in them.
On a business visit to Krakow, I visited the Jewish Quarter there. A colleague visited Auschwitz at the same time. It’s to my shame that I didn’t have the emotional courage to join him. I always weep at the final scene of the film, ‘Schindlers List’, when the survivors and the actors who play them, join to lay stones of remembrance. Given that, I just wasn’t sure I had the mental fortitude to visit the camp itself.
My walk around Krakow’s Jewish quarter was poignant enough. Empty streets that once saw the rounding up of families to be sent to labour or death camps. As I walked those streets, some with Yiddish signs of those times, I felt around me the spirits of those long gone.
There was salvation for those that Oskar Schindler took to work in his factories. In doing so, he saved a handful of precious lives. In remembrance, I bought a copy of Thomas Keneally’s book in the Jewish Museum. Whenever I look at that book, the memory of the empty streets comes flooding back to me.
The Jewish memorial in Berlin is also much affecting. Over 2700 concrete stelae standing on an irregular slope that as you approach appear unprepossessing. But once you walk among them, they seem to take on life, and you become immersed within the structure, quickly losing yourself in Reflection. On one of my visits on a rainy day, it seemed as if the very stones were weeping.
At age fifteen, Anne Frank wrote her own words of hope in her diary entry of 15 July 1944.
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again”.
Three weeks after that entry, came the discovery of the family’s hiding place. Anne would not live to see the end of the cruelty or the return of peace and tranquillity. We owe it to her and all the victims of extremism to ensure that in the future we don’t just stand by.
So, what music have I chosen this week?
Not surprisingly it’s the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”, from Verdi’s opera Nabucco. The chorus is of the exile of the Jews, from their homeland, by Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco). A chorus of tragedy but also a soaring anthem to hope.
