Remembering Auschwitz, and learning from it

Last week's commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps by Soviet troops was both moving and the right thing to do. The world must never forget the horrible atrocities that took place at these camps at the hands of the Nazi murderers; indeed it is everyone's duty to remember what happened and to pass on the memory of what took place to future generations.

The Nazis murdered 11 million people in their camps, six million of them Jews, in the Holocaust. At Auschwitz alone, 1.5 million people perished, most of them, 1.1 million, being Jews. The rest were political prisoners, Soviet and Polish prisoners of wars, gypsies and homosexuals. These too, must never be forgotten.

It is difficult to understand how man can be so cruel to his fellow man, especially when one considers that these terrible crimes took place in Europe only 60 years ago, and there are so many unanswered questions about the Holocaust. Only those who survived the camps can fully comprehend the level of utter cruelty and barbarity that existed there. Humanity, however, cannot forget that this was mass murder planned in advance by a 'civilised state' with bureaucratic ruthlessness and efficiency.

What is clear today is that Germany has completely come to terms with its Nazi past, it has expressed its shame, sorrow and revulsion over what happened and during the post-war period deve-loped into a solid pluralistic demo-cracy completely at ease with itself.

It was important and completely appropriate that the German Presi-dent took part in the Auschwitz commemoration service last Thurs-day and it was equally right for German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to hold a commemorative ceremony in Berlin on Tuesday. Mr Schröder, who expressed his coun-try's shame over the Holocaust, remarked: "Anti-Semites should never again be allowed to attack and to harm Jewish citizens and to bring disgrace upon our nation."

Kurt Julius Goldstein, an exter-mination camp survivor and presi-dent of the International Auschwitz Committee, said during the Berlin ceremony: "The vast majority of the people living in Germany today bear no guilt for the Holocaust but they carry a special responsibility. For some this is difficult to bear. And yet, these memories belong to our national identity."

Germany has certainly dealt very well with accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust and is a shining example to other countries and societies over how to deal with its past. After the war German society was completely purged of all Nazi elements, the public display of the swastika or other Nazi regalia was disallowed, denying the Holocaust was declared to be a crime and all extremist parties were banned.

Although a couple of German far right parties - which could also soon be banned - have made some gains in a couple of regional state governments, notably in Saxony recently, there has never been a resurgence of any far right party on a national level, unlike what happened in Austria a few years ago. A national politician like the Austrian Jörg Haider would simply be unacceptable and taboo in modern-day Germany.

As the number of concentration camp and extermination camp survivors decrease it is important that the world continues to remember and commemorate this terrible act of genocide so that such revolting atrocities never happen again.

Of course, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that there have not been other clear cases of mass murder which took place in the 20th century. Early in the last century, Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians and have never acknowledged this, let alone apologised for it. Stalin and Mao Zedong killed millions of their own people, and Pol Pot in Cambodia killed nearly two million people between 1975-1979. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin also committed acts of genocide during his bloody rule in the 1970s. In 1994 nearly one million Tutsis were murdered by Hutus in Rwanda. Genocide also took place in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

So have we really learned the lessons of Auschwitz? Apparently not. It is true that people are in-creasingly being held accountable for some of the genocide that took place over the past years such as in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, but the important thing is to have the political will and military capability to prevent genocide from taking place.

As I write this article people in Darfur, Sudan, are being slaugh-tered simply because of the colour of their skin. While the atrocities are taking place the United Nations still has not decided whether the term 'genocide' is actually correct in this case, despite the fact that since 2003, 70,000 people have been killed and 1.6 million displaced. One hopes that action will soon be taken in Sudan by the international community. What is the world waiting for? For the death toll to reach one million? Tony Blair has called Africa the 'scar on the conscience of the world'. Let us hope, therefore, he will use the British presidency of the G8 to do something about Sudan.

Last week's Auschwitz anniversary was also a tribute to the human spirit. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis but Hitler's Final Solution failed to eliminate Jewish life. As an Auschwitz survivor remarked during Thursday's ceremony: "I was here naked as a young girl. I was 16. I am Israeli, I have a country, I have a President."