Justice system the best memorial to the Holocaust

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 01/27/2007 3:52 PM  |  Opinion

Michael Danby, Melbourne

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland by the Soviet armed forces, which took place on Jan. 27, 1945. At the behest of the UN and the initiative of the past Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, the United Nations has asked the international community to designate the anniversary of the liberation of this paradigm of evil for commemoration.

Sixty-two years is a long time in terms of human memory, and today there are only a few survivors who have adult memories of Auschwitz. Soon there will be none. This makes it all the more important that the memory of what happened there is preserved. In part through commemorative events such as those planned for Jan. 27.

What happened at Auschwitz was that the German Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler killed more than one million people in cold blood as part of the calculated campaign of extermination that is now called the Holocaust. In Hebrew we call it the Shoah, or catastrophe.

The world now knows that when Hitler told the Reichstag on the Jan. 30, 1939, that a second world war would end with Vernichtung die Judische rasse in Europa, (the extermination of the Jews in Europe), he meant it. The overwhelming majority of those killed there were Jews, transported in freight cars to the site form almost country in Europe, to be exterminated in gas chambers or worked to death in near by mines and factories, their bodies incinerated, and their ashes thrown into a lake.

The dead at Auschwitz 150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Gypsies or Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and more than 10,000 other non-Jewish prisoners of many nationalities.

I do not wish to deny the scale of their suffering. But the remains that Auschwitz and the other six death camps in Poland and Belarus were built and operated by the Nazis for a particular purpose, namely the utter extermination of the Jewish people beginning with the Jews of Europe.

The total number of those killed in the 17th extermination camps was at least 3.2 million and possibly 3.8 million. These camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died there. To them were added Jews from the Czech and Slovak lands, from France and Belgium and the Netherlands, from Greece and Italy, Romania and Serbia.

Finally in late 1944, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz following the German occupation of Hungary. In addition, in the Nazi occupied Soviet Union, including the Baltic Shores, had more than one million Jews were killed on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS's roving killing squads often assisted by local collaborators.

By the end of late 1944, the SS and its collaborators had killed most of the European Jews they could get at. SS leader Heinrich Himmler, aware that Germany was losing the war and fearful of his own neck, ordered an end to the killings.

Local commanders continued to kill Jews and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced ""death marches"" until the last weeks of the war.

At Auschwitz, as the Red Army approached, the SS evacuated the camp on Jan. 17 and 18, 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners were marched westwards through the freezing landscape to other camps, such as Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in Germany.

Thousands of freezing, half-starved prisoners died in the snow in these futile marches.

On Jan. 27, 1945, soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front, under the command of Marshall Ivan Koniev, reached the town of Auschwitz.

Only about 7,000 prisoners were still in the Auschwitz and Birikenau camps, whose barracks had once housed 200,000 prisoners at a time. Most were Polish forced Laborers rather than Jews sent to the camp for extermination. The Jews were almost all long dead and reduced to ashes. The Soviets thus gained a very misleading impression of what had gone on at Auschwitz and it was some years before the full truth emerged.

Among those who died in the Nazi camps were my paternal grandparents, Bruno and Margarethe Danziger. This is a heritage shared by a high proportion of Australian Jews. Both my grandfather, a decorated German officer, and my grandmother I now know perished in Auschwitz.

I don't say this to claim a special status of victimization for myself or for other Australian Jews. I meet people every week, people from Cambodia or Darfur or Kurdistan, whose families also suffered appalling persecution. I point it out to emphasize that the Holocaust is not ancient history. Sixty-two years later, the Holocaust or Shoah, still casts a shadow over the family history of many people in Australia -- for some of them it is still a living nightmare.

The Nazis did not succeed in their attempt to kill all of Europe's Jews. Some governments, such as those of Bulgaria and Finland, refused to co-operate. In some countries, such as Denmark, the Jews were saved through swift action by the non-Jewish population.

In the Netherlands, there was a general strike in protest against the deportation of Jews. In France and Italy and Greece, the resistance tried to save Jews and many more were hidden by courageous non-Jewish families. Even in the heart of Poland, many brave Catholic Poles, including the late Pope John Paul II, risked their lives to help and rescue Jews.

The repercussions of these terrible events have echoed through post-war history. The impetus to Zionism, the belief that the Jews could only live in security in a state of their own. The state of Israel came into existence because there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, languishing in camps throughout Europe with nowhere to go, and because the experiences of the Holocaust gave the Zionist movement a determination to prevail over the British, and the Arab states, in the creation and subsequent defense of the Jewish state -- Israel.

The Labor Member for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby, is the only Jewish member of the Australian National Parliament.

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