We take somber note of the reality that in 1933 Europe contained the world’s largest Jewish community. Until that time, Progressive Jews participated actively and productively in European society, adding much to the quality of life in science, art, music, medicine, law, teaching, commerce and many other fields. In the ensuing 12 years, six million Jews were wiped out, and the people of the world — with many laudable exceptions — watched in silent assent.
A reminder from the World Union for Progressive Judaism.
Not entirely happy with the idea that the people of the world watched in silent assent. How many people of the world knew what was happening?
What are the lessons of the Holocaust? Nowadays we know about dreadful crimes of religous persecution that happen in many places around the world, practically every day, but can we react more effectively than the world managed to do in the 1930s?
I’m extremely proud to say that my Father was one of the laudable exceptions.
He fought valiantly against the fascists during the war and afterwards provided medical services free of charge to Jews who fled the pogroms and settled in Australia.
It was through Dad and his Jewish mates that I met holocaust survivors and became slowly introduced into Jewish culture.
Dad would be turning in his grave given the upsurge in anti Jewish racism the world is spewing forth yet again.
There will be no second holocaust.
Mark my words.
Rabz
27 Jan 12 at 12:59 am
The people who have never heard of the Holocaust are not evil. It’s the ones who have heard and want to ensure it happens again – but with 100% completion – they’re the evil ones.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/01/25/again/
Gab
27 Jan 12 at 1:07 am
“It’s the ones who have heard and want to ensure it happens again – but with 100% completion – they’re the evil ones.”
Yes. Like whoever printed out this sign for this little girl in tolerant multi-cultural Melbourne, for instance.
spot
27 Jan 12 at 1:27 am
I think the point of the World Union of Progressive Judaism is that throughout the 1930s, there were clear signs (from the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 through to Kristallnacht in 1938 and so on) that the Jews were being actively persecuted and there were limited places to go for Jews trying to flee Germany or Austria. Clearly, there is a lesson about how we approach religious persecution nowadays.
Whether or not there was wider knowledge of the eventual industrial scale of the Holocaust (rather than the earlier “mere” persecution) is a different question. Certainly, there is more recent evidence that the British and American governments had some awareness of what was taking place. Ian Kershaw’s new book ‘The End’ suggests that members of the ‘German Resistance’ (such as Admiral Canaris of German Military Intelligence) were letting the British know through contacts in Switzerland.
I think it has also been established that many “ordinary people” were complicit in Germany’s crimes (take for instance, the willingness of Lithuanians to assist in the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry, the attacks on Jews on death marches as they passed through German villages from Eastern Europe and into Germany proper etc).
rose
27 Jan 12 at 1:47 am
It’s a good question, Rafe. As I understand it, a good deal of the world knew that Jews were persecuted (though without knowing the specifics). Nonetheless, ‘Jewish’ boats were turned away from British ports, as they were throughout the Americas. This inaction was the inspiration for our current laws on asylum seekers. This inspiration has been forgotten by both major parties in Australia.
THR
27 Jan 12 at 2:13 am
It is quite possible that the 60-70 million who died in ww2 wre rather distracted.
jjohn malpas
27 Jan 12 at 9:50 am
Not so far. Christians are being massacred in Nigeria. Coptic Christians are being persecuted in Egypt. In Iraq, Christian churches are being bombed (with people in them). Christians are being hounded in Malaysia and Indonesia. And there’s more.
We’ve confronted communism and fascism. We’ll have to deal with islamism next.
DavidLeyonhjelm
27 Jan 12 at 11:38 am
Bravo Rafe for drawing attention to International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The questions you raise are important but less important than remembering and making yet another vain attempt to grapple with this event on an intellectual, emotional and spiritual level. It is beyond my efforts, it overwhelms. And as Primo Levi (Auschwitz prisoner 174517) suggested, we will never truly know its full horrors because the only true witnesses to those horrors, those who experienced it in its ultimate form, were were those consumed by it, murdered. Levi was humble enough to know that they had experienced and therefore understood something beyond what even he could know.
As part of the ongoing struggle to comprehend, I re-read Vassily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka” this morning after seeing your post. Grossman was one of the very first to write for a wide audience about the Holocaust – he was a journalist with the Red Army (spent months on the west bank of the Volga during Stalingrad and later wrote the modern classic “Life and Fate”). It is an extraordinary piece of non-fiction, based on what he saw and from interviews done immediately after the liberation of eastern Europe. This evening I will re-read the most moving of Holocaust literature, “The Night”. If I can find the stomach. It overwhelms.
p.s. Discussion of current events in the context of the Holocaust are facile and repugnant, in the extreme.
1080
27 Jan 12 at 12:34 pm
Why? Because the Nazis were better organised?
.
27 Jan 12 at 12:40 pm
And Rafe if you have any suggestions for reading on the subject (of a broader nature, not to the specifics which I think I have down – Synder’s “Blood Lands” was a worthy recent addition there), feel free to pass them on. I’ve read Levi, Wiesel, Frankl, Amery, Grossman and Arendt (among others) but would appreciate anything that adds by way of insights, comprehension, over-views.
ps finding some of the commentary on ‘Rules for the Nihilistic’ stomach turning this day in particular.
1080
27 Jan 12 at 2:50 pm
Why?
.
27 Jan 12 at 2:51 pm
ps finding some of the commentary on ‘Rules for the Nihilistic’ stomach turning this day in particular.
Talk about a desperate attention-seeking…
Gab
27 Jan 12 at 2:52 pm
Because the commentary (except for m0nty and THR) is overwhelmingly anti-violence, whereas Sando is notoriously pro-violence.
Aren’t you Wayne?
Fisky
27 Jan 12 at 2:53 pm
Close Gab but not quite. Some things are more important (and some of the racism, albeit often low-level or latent or unconscious) is hard to bear. You go read Grossman, won’t take long and you’ll get why.
1080
27 Jan 12 at 2:56 pm
There is no racism you morally bankrupt dickhead.
.
27 Jan 12 at 3:07 pm
Yes, good point dot.
We don’t need to hear the opinions of Communists on this important day.
Fisky
27 Jan 12 at 3:13 pm
Most of this crowd wouldn’t read Grossman in a thousand years. Great thinkers like Ann Coulter or Andrew Bolt, sure, but not Grossman or Levi.
THR
27 Jan 12 at 3:15 pm
Martin Grossman wrote a book?
Gab
27 Jan 12 at 3:18 pm
I was under the impression that the “Final Solution” was only conceived in 1942, so I’d be surprised if it was well known outside the Nazi leadership, even in Germany, let alone the whole world. Sure, the whole world knew of Nazi victimisation of German Jews prior to WWII – the design of which was to get the Jews to flee Europe voluntarily, which a lot sensibly did, a lot tragically did not because they thought it would die down, and then a lot realised too late, by which time the world had put up their “fuck off, we’re full” sign.
Even once war started – and before 1942 – how well known were things like the Warsaw ghetto, as distinct from the general hideousness of armies treating their enemies hideously? I only ask because I’ve seen a few docos, which showed the propaganda links the Nazis went to to disguise what they were doing to Poland and Russia’s Jews. Or maybe there was lots of other information getting out that enabled ‘the world’ to see the reality?
And weren’t the Allied soldiers stunned, shocked, and horrified when they discovered the camps? Or did they really know that the Final Solution had been well underway during the previous 3 years?
Peter Patton
27 Jan 12 at 3:28 pm
THR
What is it about leftists and their complete ignorance of history? The Refugee Convention was drafted in 1951 in response to 400,000 refugees who were still in European camps, but could not return to their homes through fear of reprisals. These were overwhelmingly citizens of the Soviet Union, or the colonies it annexed in eastern Europe in the years after WWII.
The Refugee Convention was written explicitly to protect people from Soviet Communism, especially after the Soviets had been repatriating their own people to slave labour camps inside the Soviet Union. It had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
Peter Patton
27 Jan 12 at 3:51 pm
You are in error, Patsy. The 1951 refugee convention was a response to the Holocaust. Other motives/events may also have been spurs, but the Holocaust – and the refusal of many nations to accept Jewish asylum seekers – was the principal source of the convention.
THR
27 Jan 12 at 5:06 pm
Right. Well you’ll probably be offered a Chair in Something with this evidence you must have found, which overturns all the relevant UN and international law documents related to the 1951 Convention. So show this new evidence you’ve found.
Fraud.
Peter Patton
27 Jan 12 at 5:36 pm
Erm, Patsy, don’t you see this means it shows the guilt of the West made them think “shit, we’ve already let the Nazis decimate civilians, we mustn’t let the commie scum do it as well”…
.
27 Jan 12 at 5:44 pm
No, it does not mean anything of the sort. WRT to the Jews “Never Again” was sorted out by the Jews themselves in 1948. It is known today as Israel.
Peter Patton
27 Jan 12 at 5:58 pm
Israel was part of the package, but nonetheless, Jewish groups were extensively consulted as the 1951 refugee convention was developed. You’d have to be a complete idiot to think such a protocol was developed without the (then recent) events of the Holocaust in mind.
THR
27 Jan 12 at 6:06 pm
Oh FFS. The 1951 Convention was written to address actual, existing problems right there and then, not problems which had already been fixed. Go and do some reading. Why haven’t you linked to Sammy Sparrow or one of your white spokespeoples for Indigenous Peoples’s? You know, your usual authorities?
Peter Patton
27 Jan 12 at 6:13 pm
You nincompoop, Patsy. The Convention itself quite explicitly contradicts you. See page 2:
http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html
Retractions are in order.
THR
27 Jan 12 at 6:17 pm
Not so, and frankly these persistent attempts to take anything and everything from history to score petty partisan debating points gives new meaning to words like facile. The origins go back to a work done in response to similar problems after WWI by the League of Nations and an earlier 1933 convention. Europe was awash with displaced and homeless people at the end of WWII (some of whom had fled ahead of the advancing Red Army). The very first session of the UN (Feb 1946) discussed the problem and drew up some basic principles, like no forced returns. They were primarily dealing the problems of people displaced by the Nazis, including millions of slave labourers – not the Holocaust specifically although many were concentration and death camp survivors as well. The 1951 convention followed on from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
1080
27 Jan 12 at 6:24 pm
Whatever the intent, the 1951 Convention has also been used to save and resettle the victims of Communism, including the one million refugees who fleed Wayne’s favourite “liberated” socialist paradise in the late 70s.
Fisky
27 Jan 12 at 8:35 pm