We are commemorating another anniversary of the greatest tragedy suffered by the Jewish people in its entire history: the planned, structured and executed extermination by the Nazis during World War II of 6 million Jews, a third of the world population of our people in that immoral and inhuman stage of Humanity.
Much has been written about this tragedy, but it will never be enough. It should be remembered that General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the concentration camps be filmed, especially the cadaverous appearance of the survivors. He thought that years later, what happened would be denied because the tragedy was unparalleled in the annals of human history. Who will believe that man was able to commit such crimes?
Why did the Germans build crematoria in some concentration camps? It would have been more efficient to simply dump the bodies in some field or perhaps bury them underground. Perhaps the hatred for the Jew was of such a magnitude that it blinded them, and the Nazis did not want to leave a trace of their existence and turn them into ash that the wind would take away. They diverted resources from the front lines of combat in order to execute their diabolical plan against the Jewish people: “the final solution”, their total extermination so that there would be no remnant of what they considered to be a plague for humanity.
Perhaps there was another fundamental or simultaneous purpose: to leave no trace of the crime, if there is nobody of crime, there is no proof of a crime. And what of some survivors who in the future could bear witness to what happened? No one will believe them, because what they would tell would be impossible to imagine.
For this reason, towards the end of the war, the German army took care to destroy the vestiges of some of the concentration camps, so as not to leave visual testimony, not to leave a trace.
Decades after the tragedy, what should be our attitude? I remember that the late president of Venezuela Carlos Andrés Pérez once told me: how long are you going to talk about what happened? And he was quite right, we can’t guide our lives by cultivating hatred, because as one survivor recently put it: “Hate is a disease that can destroy your enemy, but will eventually destroy you as well.”
On the other hand, forgetting would be a sin and a tragedy. History teaches us that indifference is a mistake that parallels crime. The attitude of many nations that saw what was happening in those days and did not react, made them accomplices by inaction. History teaches that you have to respond, react immediately to any expression of anti-Semitism. To be silent is to agree tacitly to what is happening!
But the past is no longer, the present is temporary and we have to look to the future that cannot be built on a base of rancor or hatred. We must not forget, but at the same time we have to focus on tomorrow and the day after, and the best example is the State of Israel, which thanks to its Chalutzim, the pioneers who turned the desert into a garden, along with survivors of WWII and those who escaped the rancor and discrimination in several Arab countries, are building a nation and a society that is also unequaled in modern times. Including their reaction to the fearsome COVID-19 is an example for other nations to follow in the footsteps of the State of Israel.
Zachor, we will remember, but at the same time, we will look to the future with optimism because our people are anchored in the morality taught by the Torah that has allowed us to survive after all the nations that in past centuries tried to destroy us have disappeared.
We will transit, in the words of the prayer we recite after reading from the Torah on Mondays and Thursday: “from affliction to relief, from darkness to light, from submission to redemption, now, quickly and at an early time.”
Rabbi Pynchas Brener
