"Holocuast Remembered" in the June edition of Jewish Journal

Holocaust Remembered
By Judge Steve Walker

Editor’s Note: This updated article was originally written and researched in 1990 based on a major Holocaust exhibit in the Pentagon where I was assigned two weeks a year as an Army Reservist for 12 years.

We know that six million Jews, plus scores of gypsies, Slavs, political prisoners, dissenters, homosexuals, prisoners of war, and the mentally ill were systematically slaughtered during a 12-year reign of terror in Nazi Germany, from 1933-45.

The nightmare, still fresh in the minds of survivors even today 66 years later, continues to strike terror in the hearts of those who have the courage to remember the Holocaust. It also causes many of us who visited concentration camps like Dachau years later, to vicariously experience the horror of those events that touched our relative’s lives.

It has been stated on many occasions that only an informed citizenry can prevent it from happening again. But one can’t help wondering if just being informed is enough.

We have seen films on the History Channel documenting the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 where numerous local German soldiers living near the death camps claimed they were not aware inmates had been marched into gas chamber and their bodies buried in mass graves or cremated in large ovens. Is it possible they were so oblivious to their surroundings that they actually were clueless as to the atrocities? It is hard to believe.

While it is reported that many ordinary, but courageous, men and women in every country of occupied Europe showed compassion in helping Jewish victims, the majority were indifferent or collaborated with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich.

A survivor of the camps, Susan Tabor said upon release, “Someone cared; someone thought we were human beings worth saving.” Yet in 1938 laws were passed to deny the Jewish community the right of property ownership, to forbid Jewish doctors from treating Aryan patients, and to prevent Jewish lawyers from practicing law. Jewish businesses had to register with the state, a ruling encouraging them to sell their businesses to Aryan owners at a reduced rate.

From 1933 to 1939, Jews in Germany lost their jobs, citizenship and civic rights, forcing them into desperate isolation. An article, dated Nov. 24^th, 1938 in the Das Schwarze Korps, an SS journal stated, “No German should be asked to live under the same roof with Jews…we must expel them from our house and living areas.”

In that same issue of the journal, another article declared, “We shall now bring the Jewish problem to its complete solution, because it is essential, because we will no longer listen to the outcry of the world, and because actually there is no force in the world that prevents us from doing so. The plan is clear: total removal, total separation.”

Another survivor of history’s worst hour, Resha Weiss, later said, “We stood there, starving, trembling, shivering, cropped and ragged. And only then did we look at each other. Not even the closest relatives were recognizable. Fortunately we couldn’t see ourselves, but some, looking at their companions, burst into hysterical laughter or uncontrollable weeping.”

What started out as hateful propaganda, ended in brutal mass murder. As far back as 1895 in Germany, anti-Semitism was rampant, foreshadowing of those atrocities that would eventually be perpetrated in the name of nationalism and even Christianity.

We learned in school about the assembly line exterminations, the boxcars filled with Jews, the six death camps, how the healthy Jews were assigned to work on projects from 10 to 12 hours and usually lasted three months before dying from exhaustion.

We also learned by 1945, six million Jews were mass executed, starved and worse. A Dutch witness reported, “The sick, the aged, and babies in arms were crushed into barred cattle trucks…they had been aboard the train for two days and had only once received food.” It was also reported by the witness that “babies suffocated in the crush and the SS Guards had even forced in more people and bolted the door.”

What was Hitler’s justification? In Mein Kampf he wrote “So I believe I act in the spirit of the Almighty God by defending myself from the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Lest we forget, we must remember an Old Testament paraphrased quote from Ecclesiastes: “So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are down under the sun, and behold the tears of such as are oppressed. And they had no comforter. On the side of the oppressors, there was power, but they had no comforters. Whereas I praised the dead more than the living, for better is he than one who has not been born to see the evil work that is done under the sun.”

Should we forget the Holocaust or any persecution against humanity we will fall into the trap that George Santayana, philosopher, addressed when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Steve Walker is a Justice of the Peace, Pct. 2 and former Journalist and son of a Jewish father, and Catholic mother.