Sixty nine years ago today the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland. Approximately 84,000 survivors were discovered by the Russians.
By the time the Soviet Army arrived over one million people had been murdered, 90 per ceent of them Jews.
Today to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the liberation of the camp more than 50 members of the Israeli parliament toured the prisoner blocks at Auschwitz.
The delegation was the biggest ever from the Knesset to come to the death camp.
The Knesset members were joined by Holocaust survivors, Israeli government ministers, Polish officials and representatives from dozens of other countries to mark the date, which is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Today, 69 years after we left this hell called Auschwitz, we are here again as proud people, as proud citizens of the new Jewish state that rose out of the ruins of European Jewry,” Israeli Auschwitz survivor Noah Klieger (87) told a memorial ceremony.
Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog, head of the Israeli delegation, said Jews must work to create for future generations “a different world, a hopeful future, a world without fear where a Jew will be safe in any and every place. “If we lose the hope to build a new world, then we give in to Auschwitz,” he said.
Earlier, the Israeli delegates walked beneath a metal sign with the German words “Arbeit Macht Frei”, or “Work Makes You Free” – the same sight that greeted inmates arriving at the camp. All but a few survivors died in the gas chambers, in medical experiments, or from disease and malnutrition.
Monday’s tour of the site included a stop at the prisoner blocks where piles of human hair and children’s clothes have been preserved as evidence of the mass killings.
The Israeli visitors later marched to the nearby site of the Birkenau concentration camp for the memorial ceremony. They were scheduled afterwards to recite prayers and light candles for the victims.
3 comments:
This commemoration might have more meaning were the Knesset and the Israeli State not maintaining their own modern concentration camp in Gaza and forcefully colonising the remaining Palestinian territory in the West Bank.
Whatever moral authority they might have had from the Holocaust has been squandered as they took on the role of their former tormentors.
What would you have said when in Soviet times a high ranking USSR delegation had visited Auschwitz, which had been liberated by the Soviet Army?
If that question is addressed to me, I'm not sure that I understand it.
Unlike the Israelis, the Soviets were not claiming legitimacy based on the victimhood of the Holocaust.
I am not intending to minimise the Holocaust, only the hypocritical political misuse of it.
Post a Comment