Commemorating death camps liberation

I was not in Poland for the "March of the Living" on Thursday, when an estimated 20,000 people from around the world joined Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Polish leaders to commemorate the Holocaust victims of Poland's Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps marking the 60th anniversary of the camps' liberation.

But I did visit the War Museum in Warsaw earlier last week, and was awed by the courage, resilience and tenacity of the residents of Warsaw who had their city completely razed and had to survive through the city sewers network.

The way they have rebuilt their city from scratch is incredible.

The worst hit were the Polish Jews, but Hitler's order to destroy Warsaw because of the resistance affected all the Poles.

The Nazis had hoped to starve the Jews in their ghetto. They had blocked all access, but the non-Jewish Poles managed to get food to them and the Nazi plan failed.

Although they were malnourished, they managed to survive, only to be tricked with promises of better conditions to move out and ended up in the concentration camps.

Around six million Jews fell victim to the Nazi genocide during World War II. Around three million of Poland's 3.5 million Jews were killed and about three million European Jews in total were killed in the six death camps on occupied Polish soil.

The museum in Warsaw is a grim reminder of man's inhumanity to man, and we need to be constantly reminded and to do more to ensure such atrocities do not occur.

The fact that the world reacted late to Rwanda only strengthens my belief that, unless we are vigilant and active, genocide will happen again and again.

A Tel Aviv University report released on Wednesday found that there had been a 39 per cent increase in attacks against Jews worldwide in 2004 compared with 2003.

Researchers said that anti-Semitic incidents had increased by 68 per cent in Britain and almost 40 per cent in France last year, calling 2004 "the most violent year in the last 15 years".

In an emotional speech during the commemoration Prime Minister Sharon said: "This is perhaps the most significant expression of the difference between those days when Jews were led on death marches, and today, when we walk with pride."

The number of Jews living in Warsaw is nowhere near what it was before the war and tensions, which developed during the communist years, are now thawing.

The Poles resent the fact that the Russians stood on the border watching until the Allies arrived and then claimed they had liberated Poland. And I got a strong feeling that the Poles did not love the Russians.

What was interesting, when talking to Polish people was that history differed slightly, depending on who was doing the telling.

One person told me that there was no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles before the war. "We were all Poles." But the ghetto did exist. When I mentioned this, another Pole said there were tensions because the Jews liked to keep to themselves and they created the ghetto.

However what is clear is that many Poles did show solidarity with their Jewish counterparts and suffered tremendously for it.

The Commemoration on Thursday marked an agreement between Israel and Poland and consolidated warming of relations the two countries have enjoyed since the fall of Communism in Poland 15 years ago.

Israel has agreed to iron out one area of tension with Poland over annual trips by thousands of Israeli students to former concentration camps and Holocaust memorials there.

"The Polish criticism is that the students' entire visits are focused on concentration camps ... which gives an impression that the ones who committed the Holocaust were Poles not Nazis," said an Israeli education ministry official. Polish officials have urged Israel to broaden the itinerary of the visits to include classes about the thriving Jewish community that lived in Poland for centuries before the Holocaust.

Vandals and horses on our roads

A horse bolted on one of our major thoroughfares on Tuesday afternoon. I am always amazed at our sheer good fortune. No one was hit. The horse was not so lucky and had to be put down, and its driver ended up in hospital.

But the accident could have had much more serious consequences, and it still should be a warning that something needs to be done to get the horses off the main roads. Karozzini were still clogging up the inside lane of the main road to Valletta at 9.15 on Thursday morning.

Politicians seem to shy away from any kind of confrontation except with the unions. The hunters, noise polluters (especially the bombi), squatters who take over prime beach sites, public transport providers, especially the white taxis at the airport and the karozzini all seem to get away with anarchy.

Then we cannot understand who could be so crass as to vandalise our monuments! The hunters kill our birds and take over the countryside. The festa bombi pollute our summers with their constant daily explosions.

People are allowed to build shantytowns on beaches. The white taxi drivers monopolise the airport arrivals lounge and treat it like their local band club.

The use of foul language by some of them is shocking, and I felt for the HSBC employees who have to put up with it all day, when I was last there. I thanked God the tourists did not understand Maltese. It would otherwise have been a great welcome to sunny Malta. MTA wake up!

And the karozzini owners clog up our roads in rush hours and leave a stinking mess. We see a lot of letters to the press decrying the fate of the poor horses, but the only time their owners seemed to care about their welfare was when the Valletta council tried to do something about the mess they make.

They complained the bags meant to catch their droppings would make the horses uncomfortable. They do not seem to take into account the discomfort caused to the horses in the summer heat and their stress in busy traffic.

Now one poor horse had to die a painful death, because the vet was asked not to inject the dying horse, (the quickest way to relieve the pain) because the injected substance would make the horse's meat inedible.

A car's exhaust had backfired and the horse bolted 150 metres from the Lion fountain in Floriana down to Portes des Bombes at 2.45 p.m. Yet our politicians spout rhetoric and do nothing.

The vandalism at Portes de Bombes is symptomatic of our society's ails. Condemnation is not enough. We need to establish the social implications.

As one reader put it in an e-mail the other day, we need to tackle "the Maltese law-breaking habits and social ignorance". The vandals act partly out of ignorance and partly because they do not control their violent reactions. They show immaturity like a child having a tantrum and breaking his toys because he is being refused what he wants.

Education, education, education is what is needed and I do not mean in the academic sense, but the basics of why we need to control our frustrations and are civil to one another and respect our heritage.

It is not the authorities the vandals are harming but their children and their children's children. And that message has to be put across loud and clear.