Earlier this week I asked Don Krausz, chairman of the South African Holocaust Survivors Association, to share some thoughts with us on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). Here is his reply, which he has also sent to the SA Jewish Report.
Dear Steven and Michael,
On Tuesday we lit six flares to commemorate four and a half million Jewish men and women and one and a half million children who were murdered in the Holocaust. We stood before a memorial that showed six giant bronze hands projecting from the earth, each holding a ram’s horn, a Shofar, the ancient Jewish instrument used to alert the people. They signify the final message from six million martyred human beings.
The Shofarim face towards each other. If they were meant to convey a message to mankind then should they not face outwards, towards the world? What was their sculptor, Herman Wald’s vision? Did he design the monument this way knowing that the world would not listen? Did he turn the Shofarim toward each other in a statement that their message would be heard and understood by Jews only?
After the liberation of the concentration and death camps the surviving inmates believed that their agony had ended. Once the civilised world learned what had occurred it would recoil in revulsion and horror. It would ensure that never again would humanity commit such inhumanity.
Instead we witnessed the massacres of Biafra, Campuchea, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the horrors of Apartheid, the tortures and slaughters of Central Africa, Vietnam, Rwanda, Tibet, Bosnia and now Darfur and the Moslem world.
The lesson of the Holocaust seems to have been that one may perpetrate mass murder with impunity.
Hitler’s ghost prevails. His hatred and atrocities are denied, justified or advocated.
The word Zionism has become a pejorative.
Had these maligned Zionists been able to create the State of Israel in 1933, millions of men, women and children might have been saved.
We Jews are left to ponder on what has changed since 1945. Not Mankind; not the hatred. Then we realise that we Jews have changed. We stand taller, more confident, proud, self-assured. We are readier to fight our enemies whether by word or deed.
Few survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but its example has inspired us ever since.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 provided Jews with their first safe haven in 2,000 years. They and their enemies learned that Jews could fight, defend their lives and their land and prevail although vastly outnumbered and outgunned.
When in 1967 Jews once more faced annihilation, that threat was removed in six days.
When terrorists high jacked a plane to Entebbe and separated Jews from non-Jews, they sealed their own fate.
When the Hamas bombarded Israeli civilians with missiles, those terrorists found themselves counting their dead among the ruins of Gaza.
We Jews have learned the message of the Holocaust: Mir seinen do! Never again!
Don Krausz
Holocaust survivor.
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