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File photograph
shows some of the 600
children, who survived
Auschwitz, show their
tattooed identification
numbers.
Some
7,000 prisoners, including
more than 600 children and
youths below the age of
18, were alive when the
camp was liberated.
On
January 27, 2005, hundreds
of survivors and dozens of
world leaders commemorated
the 60th anniversary of
the camp's liberation by
the Soviet army and pay
homage to the estimated
1.5 million people, mostly
Jews, murdered there by
the Nazis.
(Picture
taken from a Soviet
documentary on the
liberation of Auschwitz
1945) -- AUSCHWITZ
MUSEUM
Never
again!
by
Marc
H. Morial
President
and CEO National
Urban League
Marc
H. Morial,
President of the National
Urban League, is
the former two-term Mayor
of New Orleans, former
President of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors,
and author of TO BE
EQUAL. He is a
Columnist for MaximsNews.com.
Hear his weekly Radio
Commentary Online.
See
Marc Morial's bio.
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
Please
see All of
Marc Morial's MaximsNews
columns below.*
UNITED NATIONS -
1 February 2005
/ www.MaximsNews.com
/
Never
again!
Those
were the words -- the
promise -- made with a
shocked fervor by the
Western alliance nations
six decades ago after
having seen in the last
days of the war against
Nazi Germany the
concentration camps of
Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,
Buchenwald, and the
others Adolf Hitler had
spread across Germany
and eastern Europe.
Those
prisons contained the
horrible evidence of an
evil the pre-war world
had foolishly thought no
advanced society was
capable of:
A
campaign of genocide
simultaneously aided and
masked by the processes
of a perverted
bureaucratic
rationalization and an
even more perverted
pretense of "scientific
inquiry."
The
Third Reich, fueled by
ridiculous claims of an
Aryan racial purity and
racial supremacy, was at
bottom a criminal
enterprise.
It
was built on murder; it
lived for
murder.
Its
leaders intended to
murder all the Jews in
Europe, and it murdered
nearly half of them,
along with European
Roma, the people once
derogatorily called
"Gypsies,"
homosexuals, political
dissenters, and other
"undesirables."
Millions
of men, women and
children perished.
The
Auschwitz death camp was
the largest of them all
and the worst -- more
than one and a half
million people perished
there, suffocated in its
gas chambers or executed
by its firing squads and
burned in its
crematoria.
On
January 27, sixty years
to the day after the
Russian Army liberated
the camp in the waning
days of the Third Reich,
leaders of government,
camp survivors, and
ordinary people from
more than thirty nations
gathered to mark that
long-ago moment and, as
the number of the
survivors of the camps
shrink more and more, to
urge the rest of the
world not to forget what
happened there and
throughout the rest of
the hell Nazi Germany
created.
World
leaders spoke, of
course.
But
from the news dispatches
I saw, perhaps the most
poignant moment occurred
at the end of the
ceremonies when a former
camp inmate, Merka
Shevach, Polish-born,
but now an Israeli
citizen, seized the
microphone and,
according to the New
York Times,
declared:
"I
was here naked as a
young girl;
"I
was 16.
"They
brought my family here
and burnt them;
"they
stole my name and gave
me a number."
She
then pulled back her
sleeve to show those
gathered the awful
evidence tattooed on her
arm -- the number 15755
-- before ending:
"Now,
I have a country.
"I
have an army, I have a
president, I have a
flag, and this will
never happen again!"
The
question which should
haunt us all is:
Can
we be so sure?
After
all, we live in a time
riddled with searing
evidence of the great
capacity of individuals,
and groups, and heads of
states with vast
bureaucracies at their
disposal to commit the
most heinous mass crimes.
We
have seen, and continue to
see, campaigns of genocide
waged with horrific
brutality in the Balkans,
in Rwanda, in Dafur.
We
have looked into the faces
of men and women who
countenance the murder of
thousands upon thousands
of innocents to satisfy
their own egos.
We
have mourned the innocent,
whose tragic fate
seemingly defies
explanation.
My
predecessor, Hugh B.
Price, considered this
very issue in a column
more than two years ago
celebrating the awarding
of the 2002 Nobel Prize
for Literature to the European
writer Imre Kertesz.
The
Nobel Prize jury's
proclamation stated that
his novels and essays had,
"upheld
the fragile experience of
the individual against the
barbaric arbitrariness of
history"
--those
instances in which
innocent people are caught
up in events of profound
tragedy.
Kertesz,
a Hungarian-born Jew, had
witnessed and survived two
of the most destructive
examples of the barbaric
arbitrariness of history.
As
a teenager, he was
imprisoned in Auschwitz
and Buchenwald.
Afterward,
he lived in Hungary during
the entire time of its
domination by the Soviet
Union.
But,
although he lived in an
environment where
governments demanded a
rigid, stifling
conformity, his novels and
essays, the Nobel
committee noted, have
always expressed a
relentless resistance to
unjust social and
political conformity, to
accepting the rule of
history's barbaric
arbitrariness over the
importance of the
individual.
That
fact -- of cruel fate
overtaking the innocent --
is the oldest of human
stories, one that has been
visited upon many
individuals and many
peoples.
It
did not end with the
liberation of the Jews and
others from the Nazi
concentration camps, as
the West promised it
would; and, sadly, the
likelihood is great that after
Dafur the world will
face more tests of its
capacity to quickly stop a
genocide.
That
is another reason to
embrace the survivors of
the Nazi concentration
camps as both individuals
and as representatives of
those who perished, and to
remember what they
endured.
Because
the world has not kept its
pledge of never
again, we must make
certain that we never
forget.
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
Please
CONFIRM your free
Subscription to MaximsNews:
*Marc
Morial's Columns in MaximsNews
Never
again! 1
February 2005
Jack
Johnson, American 27
January 2005
The
Mississippi Arrest:
Bending Toward
Justice... 11
January 2005
Reforming America's
Obsession with
Incarceration... 7
December 2004
A
Pre-Election Snapshot of
Black America... 26
October 2004
Issues
for the Candidates -- and
for Us... 19
October 2004
The
"Routine"
Tragedy in the Sudan... 2
September 2004
A
Wonderful Life... 26
August 2004
America,
We Have A Problem...
19
August 2004
Looking
Forward; Leaving No One
Behind... 28
July 200428 July 2004
Empowering
Communities, Changing
Lives...
8
July 2004
July:
The
Other Black History
Month... 30
June 2004
Justice
for History's Sake—and
Our Own... 24
June 2004
Let
America Be America The
Beautiful...
16
June 2004
Quiet
Activism on The Movement's
Front Lines... 8
June 2004
Vernon
Jarrett, Dreamer and Doer
... 2
June 2004
Buddy
Fletcher's Gift...
26
May 2004
The
Murder of Emmett Till: Still
Seeking Justice...
20
May 2004
The
Meaning of the Brown
Decision... 12
May 2004
The
Complexity of Black
Achievement...
4
May 2004
USA
Today's Con Artist...
27
April 2004
The
"Moving Target"
of Black Educational
Progress
... 13
April 2004
Elaine
Jones: Energized
by Adversity...
6
April 2004
The
Urban League in
Washington: Bringing
Reinforcements... 30
March 2004
The
Pain of Those Left
Behind... 17
March 2004
Deeply
Desiring Denial... 9
March 2004
One
Step Forward; Two Steps
Back...
3
March 2004
Innocent
of the Crime, But Almost
Executed Anyway...
24
February 2004
Civil
Rights: America's
Unfinished Business...
17
February 2004
What
Will They Do Now?
2
February 2004
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