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This article is excellent. I have many Jewish friends and as a media publisher I feel it is important to keep these stories alive. What the artilce shows is that when there is no education, there can be no understanding. When there is no understanding, there can be no love. Without love, it will happen again. And it can never happen again.
Yesterday 27 January 2020 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year commemorating 75 years since the liberation of Nazi death factory, Auschwitz. As the years move on, there fewer voices of survivors.
Miriam Feiler one of our valued contributors' family on her husband’s side was decimated during the Holocaust. The few surviving relatives found refuge in Australia and were able to rebuild their lives from the horror.
The affects are still fresh. With the ever rising scourge of anti-semitism globally, it is this generations responsibility to keep her family’s story alive by documenting it, sharing it, and helping children of the next generation to find the narrative to pass it on.
“Perhaps then, stories of Australian schoolchildren taunting their Jewish peers as “vermin” or of the insignia of Nazi killing squads being proudly displayed at nationalist rallies, or the flag of the Nazi regime being hoisted in a Victorian town for all to see, can be consigned to the dustbin of history.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reported: On the eve of Monday's 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a new study has found that a quarter of French millennials haven’t heard of the Holocaust, while an earlier study of American millennials found that 66 per cent did not know what Auschwitz was.
The findings come at a time of surging anti-semitism in both countries, with incidents targeting French Jews rising by 74 per cent, while the US has seen a series of lethal attacks against Jewish gatherings and places of worship, the latest involving a machete attack at the home of a Rabbi in upstate New York. In Australia, serious cases of anti-semitic verbal abuse, intimidation and harassment rose by 30 per cent, from 88 to 114, in the past year.
The fact so many young people have no knowledge of a genocide conducted in the heart of enlightened Europe, in part through the operation of the most lethal and efficient killing facility in human history, is disturbing in itself. The consequences of this absence of knowledge will surely be felt for years to come. It is a challenging story to teach, harder still to fully imbibe, but one that is critical to understanding man’s destructive capacity, the endpoint of the relentless debasing of a people, and the misery that racism can unleash on the world.
More than 1.3 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, 90 per cent of them Jews. By the time the genocide of the Jews across Europe had ended, more than 3 million Jews had been wiped from existence in the death camps. The total Jewish dead stood in the vicinity of 6 million. They died in all corners of Europe, from disease in ghettos, from poison gas, mass shootings, live burial, beatings, incineration.
Seventy eight per cent of the Jews who had lived in territories that fell to the Nazis, perished. In comparison, between 1.4 per cent to 3 per cent of the non-Jewish population in the same territory was killed. Dynasties and entire families, great sages and common workers, Nobel laureates and humble students, whole villages and communities, all disappeared. Thriving Jewish intellectual and cultural centres like Krakow and Vilnius that had bustled with Jewish life, now reduced to rude husks, urban memorials of human depravity.
Please take the time to read the full article in this link written By Alex Ryvchin and posted on in The Sydney Morning Herald.
