From the New York Times, “Leaders Gather to Mark Liberation of Auschwitz”:
The presidents of Russia, Poland, Israel and Ukraine, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and other world leaders, joined about 500 invited guests in a theater here today to commemorate the freeing of thousands of people from the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp 60 years ago.
Each of the leaders spoke in turn, at a forum sponsored by the European Jewish Congress and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, about the need to keep awareness of the Holocaust alive after the last of its aging survivors have died.
Several also warned against the resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe.
“We call upon the European Union not to allow Nazism to life in the imagination of the youth of Europe like some kind of horror show,” President Moshe Katsav of Israel said, adding the allies “did not do enough” to prevent the killing of Jews in World War II.
As many as 1.5 million people, including 1 million Jews, met their death at the Auschwitz complex, which included three main camps and 39 smaller camps 40 miles southwest of Krakow. Most were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the second of the main camps, that has come to symbolize the much broader Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke proudly of the Soviet soldiers who gave themselves for the liberation of Auschwitz.
“They switched off the ovens, they saved Krakow,” he said. But he also said there was still much to be ashamed of in the current situation.
“We unfortunately still see signs of anti-Semitism in our country,” he said.
A group of Russian nationalist legislators recently called for a ban on Jewish groups in the former communist state.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland presented medals to three surviving Red Army soldiers who took part in the liberation of Auschwitz.
Survivors, several wearing the coarse blue and white caps from their prison uniforms, dotted the crowd.
The commemoration, the largest ever, marks the liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945.
Read the rest here.
I was once on a chatlist made up of academics and there was a fellow on there, a Russian emigre, who occasionally posted what he thought were real funny European jokes about Jews. It was creepy. He was not personally a bad guy, but you could tell that on the subject of Jews he was mentally coming from someplace very primal that most of us didn’t understand. It still makes my gut uneasy.
They already have forgotten.
How else could one explain this?
They’re absolving themselves of guilt in a trope only slightly less reprehensible than saying it didn’t happen or wasn’t their fault. Instead, they accuse the victims of committing the same kind of evil.
In my darker moments, it makes me regret that the atom bomb hadn’t been finished a year earlier.
My paternal grandfather had relatives who died in Auschwitz (I have a bit of the Hebrew blood in me), and I visited Dachau while in Germany several years ago. I certainly will not forget.
Thank you for this post, Jeff.
Back in the 60’s I knew a Jewish girl. One day I gave her a ride over to her parents house. She introduced me to them, and one of them had numbers tattooed on their forearm. It’s been such a long time ago that I can’t remember if it was the father or mother, but I can still see those numbers.
We don’t forget and we’re telling the story.
Anyone out there have a copy of, probably, January issue of Vanity Fair? I was listening to a radio blurb yesterday, and there is, apparently, an article with 1930’s quotes from “Joe Kennedy Jr.” You will be appalled.
I’ve not had a chance to look for the mag., but if anyone has it, you might be interested.
Argh! probably not “1930’s quotes”, but older, anyway.
When I was fifteen, my mom and I drove up to visit my sister at Middlebury College in Vermont during Winter Break. One night we decided to go to a showing put on by the campus film society. I don’t even remember what the movie was, but the opening film was a documentary on the Holocaust.
It had original black-and-white footage from the camps. I had a passing knowledge of the Holocaust, but I had never seen anything like this. The skeletal remains, the gaunt faces of people who were still alive, but whose soul and humanity had long ago been stolen from them. And then, the bulldozers. Bulldozers pushing massive piles of bodies 10, 15, 20 feet high into giant holes in the ground.
I was totally quiet afterward, and my mom didn’t say anything about it, but I was forever changed, changed in a way that is impossible for me to describe.
Is there any more reason to think that Putin shouldn’t be next?
I’ve seen similar footage, Craig—and maybe even the same footage.
Any person who could see it and not be changed, has no soul.
My Dad never talked to any of his kids about World War II. It was only after he died that we learned from our mother of his horrific nightmares recurring even into his last years. The worst dreams, we were told, revolved around his US Army engineering detail being one of the first units entering Buchenwald at its liberation.
You see tattoos on some seniors arm you should ask them about it. They want to talk about it. Unfortunately, most think people don’t really care and will be happy to talk to someone who does.