This week marked the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by allied Soviet forces. Auschwitz was the largest of the death camps created by the Third Reich. It was a testament to Germany efficiency and ingenuity. At the time of liberation there was an estimated 7,000 souls. They would die in the hundreds after the liberation directly attributed to the lack of care and constant physical abuse. When I was a teenager I met a teaching associate at a Canadian university who had a most singularly distinction of being born in Auschwitz in the early winter of 1945. Take a moment to ponder how having the singular distinction as having Auschwitz as your place of birth would mark you.
The miracle was not just that he survived but I take it as evidence that of the grace of does G-d does indeed touch us. I am heartened that in the midst of possibly the most dehumanizing circumstances conceivable that there were others who risked what was left of their humanity and life so that his mother could conceal her pregnancy, his birth, and his existence from the eyes of the overseers of death. But the miracle did not end there. Both his parents survived though no more children were born to this family. It is somehow apt that a son of Auschwitz would seek to become a philosopher.
My best friend is the daughter of a survivor of Auschwitz. Her father was just a young teenage boy when the German blitzkrieg rolled into Minsk. And it was chance that he was not rounded up and murdered like the rest of his family. He became a partisan and fought the Germans behind the lines only to be captured in the last few weeks before the liberation of Auschwitz. He was brought to Auschwitz where he was selected to be shot multiple times and left in a ditch for the dead rather than being gassed. The Sommerkind entrusted by their overseers to dispose of the dead knew him for a partisan and risked their own lives to conceal and nurse him as best they could. He too survived. But his story does not end there. Once in the Red Cross hospital where he was nursed back to life he was almost overwhelmed by the other great tragedy that the survivors faced and became a partisan for another cause. He used his survivor skills born of desperate need and honed by war to smuggle Jews into British Palestine.
The survivors of the death camps were once again marginalized and dehumanized after the war. They became the spoils of war that no one wanted to claim. Let me repeat that. NO ONE WANTED THEM. No country stepped up to the plate and said, "We bear witness to their suffering and need and will offer them safe harbour." Not one allied nation changed their immigration laws or quotas to accept the Jews. In fact, a Gallop poll taken in 1946 asked Canadians what group of immigrants did they did not want to accept;. 49% responded Jews. Only 34% were against allowing German immigration.
Let us not delude ourselves in thinking that the proposal for a Jewish state in the British Mandate of Palestine was born of humanitarian motives. It was seen as the perfect solution to a displaced disposal people that no one wanted to take in. Not in my neighborhood was the overwhelming sentiment of the world. The first and only time the Soviets voted for a pro-Israeli UN Resolution was in the creation of the Jewish state. Truth be told; they like others, had no desire for their Jewish nationals to be returned and probably speculated that the Arab population would wipe them off the map and end a potential source of dissent for generations to come. Hence, another miracle was born was born when the Star of David rose once again over Eretz Yisrael.
But what of 2005 and what has the holocaust taught us? Very little I surmise otherwise the world would not have tolerated the Soviet Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Sudan. Or allowed Eretz Israel to become a battleground for a people whose leaders preach genocide and whose rallying cry is "Death to the Jews." The very fact that a United Nations International Court of Justice ruled that a fence/wall designed to protect Israeli life and limbs but causes Palestinian inconvenience is one of the gravest miscarriages of justice and is nothing more than a modern later day pogrom.
No matter where you look, how far or wide, the pogroms against the Jews have not passed away. Even in my own Canada, there are voices among Christian churches and universities calling forth for the financial divestment of funds in Israel and their cries grow ever louder. When a former Prime Minister of Israel is not allowed to speak at a Canadian University or when a prominent Canadian university allows a faculty to sponsor an Israel-Apartheid Week wherein Israelis are demonized and equated with murdering racists is no more than the blood libels of the past brought forth in modern guise.
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