Within the Jewish and indeed the international community there are commemorations of the Holocaust; special days, weeks, months when the news media air and publish stories about Nazi Germany's Final Solution to exterminate an ethnic-cultural-religious group whom they declared to be sub-human. The extent of their mission, the extraordinary lengths to which the Third Reich committed itself in terms of complicating their WWII war effort against Allied forces bent on stopping the Axis bid for world domination, must surely have detracted in sidelining troops, materials, rolling stock and funding for the death camps from Germany's ultimate goal of triumph over the forces of democratic order and human decency.

As a Jew, I have always been aware of the fact that had I been born in Europe, chances are I would never be alive today, to live a long and happy life with my husband, another Jew whose fate would have been like my own. Had our parents never migrated from the little towns of their birth in Poland, Ukraine, Russia to flee incessant pogroms, the threats come alive with intimidation and regional conflict, we and they would never have known freedom and the liberty to make of our lives what we could, and would.

It could be said with a large degree of accuracy that most Jews of our generation, over three-score-years and ten, suffer psyches traumatically twisted by the Holocaust. For people like us, special days of remembrance are not required. Those are events whose purpose is to ensure that others be aware, know the full extent of the horrors that were unleashed on people innocent of any wrong-doing, targeted simply because of who and what haters felt them to be.

European Jewry was destined for obliteration. Six million Jewish lives were destroyed. The elderly, infants, children, men and women alike, mortally gassed, their remnants charred to smoke and bits of biology turned into effluent. Their worldly possessions lived on longer than they did, in the hands of those eager to own them. The world turned its face in shame away from what it had permitted to occur. A time of lunatic madness, an eruption of hatred so vitriolic and violent the well-organized deaths of millions shrugged off in the fog of war.

Political dissenters, homosexuals, gypsies joined the fate of the hapless, vulnerable Jewish population of Europe. Which saw Jews as a distinct and disfavoured, irritating minority among the greater population of decent folk; Jews, with an apocryphal penchant for usury, cunning, and plotting to control world affairs through monopolizing industry, communications, finance, politics. Their comeuppance, as far as the anti-Semites were concerned, was the destruction of their plans through the destruction of their lives. As for the others they were marginalized, despised and destined for a like fate because they dared to counter the ideology of fascism, or they were gays, or Roma, or people with physical or mental disabilities.

The world relented sufficiently, post WWII, to allow a new group of Jewish upstarts and rabble-rousers calling themselves Zionists to proclaim a Jewish state in the stronghold of what had become a Muslim geography, reclaiming part of the territory that was their geographic heritage, cleaving to the biblical city that hosted the most significant artefact of Judaic belief and trust in a higher power over which Islam had plastered its contemptful defiance of Judaic belief with their own sacred totem.

Anti-Semitism that so pervaded society became acknowledged in democratic societies as a blemish on the human spirit, and though it never departed the scene, it was much diminished, as a symbol of brutish inhumanity. And Jews thought they were now free to breathe the fresh air of equality and security. Now, the kind of Anti-Semitism that spawned the Holocaust has returned to Europe, and returned with a burning menace.


(Picture from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.)

View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (Auschwitz I). The gate bears the motto "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free).