Tag: auschwitz
In The Face Of Hatred, Americans Can Speak Up Or They Can Look Away

In The Face Of Hatred, Americans Can Speak Up Or They Can Look Away

There is a strip mall across the street from Auschwitz.

From the commandant’s house at Plaszow it’s a short walk to McDonald’s.

Belzec is in a residential neighborhood.

I didn’t expect that.

In 2005, when I joined an interfaith pilgrimage to these camps where the Holocaust happened, it kept surprising me to find them located, not in deep woods hidden from prying eyes, but smack in the middle of urban areas.

I assumed all this development was new, that it had grown up in the decades since the war. But our guide told me these were always residential and commercial districts. Joe Engel, a Holocaust survivor in our group, said the same thing in a different way:

“People say they didn’t know. All the camps were so close to the city. How could they not know? You could smell the ashes, the flesh.”

The closeness of death factories to places where people lived, worshiped, and shopped was chilling. It suggested that evil didn’t mind witnesses.

Saturday night, nearly eight decades after the death factories were closed, someone — more likely a gang of someones — toppled about 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. The same thing happened last week in St. Louis. And there have been dozens of false bomb threats at Jewish community centers in over two dozen states, including Florida.

When the people of Poland were forced by their occupiers to stand witness to acts of mass atrocity, each had to decide how to respond. Some acquiesced willingly. Some looked the other way. And at risk of property and life, some fought back. They hid Jews from death and smuggled them to freedom.

What Linda Sarsour and Tarek El-Messidi did last week was not nearly so dramatic or risky, but it was certainly in the same spirit of outreach to the vulnerable Other. The two activists started a campaign on LaunchGood.com, a crowdfunding website for Muslims, asking their brothers and sisters in Islam to help raise $20,000 to repair the cemetery in St. Louis.

They reached that goal in three hours. As of Tuesday afternoon, their total stood north of $140,000. Sarsour and El-Messidi say the surplus from repairing the St. Louis cemetery will go toward the one in Philadelphia — and to a fund to repair any future acts of desecration.

Why would they do this?

On their LaunchGood page, they tell a story of the Prophet Muhammad once standing to pay his respects as a Jewish funeral procession passed by. When questioned about it, they say the Prophet responded: “Is it not a human soul?”

And what greater way to honor that common soul than for members of one group of the despised to reach out to another? At a time when we confront so much of what is wrong with America, it is heartening to be reminded of what is right. Necessary, too.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that since the election of Donald Trump, there has been a spike in right-wing extremism. African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, gays, transgender men and women, all of the most vulnerable and marginalized, find themselves under renewed attack: harassment, vandalism, and even murder.

Again, no one is equating any of that with the Holocaust. That’s not the point.

Rather, the point is the willingness to see what’s going on around you, what’s being done and to whom. In the digital age, you don’t need to live across from a death camp for that. Sarsour and El-Messidi remind us that we, like the Poles once did, bear witness to a campaign of hatred. And like them, we must decide:

What kind of witnesses shall we be?

IMAGE: Rabbi Hershey Novack walks through Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri where almost 200 gravestones were vandalized. Robert Cohen / St. Louis Post-Dispatch

People Should Not Play Pokemon At Auschwitz

People Should Not Play Pokemon At Auschwitz

Here’s something I never thought I’d have to say.

People should not play Pokemon at Auschwitz.

Nor at the Sept. 11 memorial in New York City, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, or Arlington National Cemetery.

You would think this obvious, but apparently it isn’t. According to reports, people have been playing the game in these sacred spaces, often to the consternation of those who run them. As a tweet from Arlington put it last week, “We do not consider playing ‘Pokemon Go’ to be appropriate decorum on the grounds of ANC.”

Apparently, we have reached a point in our devolution where people can’t figure such things out for themselves.

As you may not know if you have a life, Pokemon — short for Pocket Monsters — are digital creatures, characters in what was originally a Japanese video game (there have since been movie and television spin-offs) that’s been around since the ’90s. The latest iteration, Pokemon Go, has become a global sensation since its July 6 release; Survey Monkey calls it the most successful mobile game in U.S. history, with 21 million daily active users.

You play it on your smartphone. It’s synced with the real world so that Pokemon characters pop up on screen as you go various places. Your object is to capture them. Even, apparently, if you’re at the crematoria in Auschwitz or John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington.

When a Washington Post reporter questioned the propriety of doing this at the Holocaust Museum, “Angie,” age 37, responded with the game’s catchphrase: “Gotta catch ’em all.”

To repeat: Angie, age 37, the Holocaust Museum … “Gotta catch ’em all.”

I’ve never been so ready to throttle someone I’ve never even met.

I’m trying really hard here not to do a you-kids-better-get-off-my-lawn rant, but seriously, once upon a time didn’t adults seem more, well … adult? People were … older then. My dad turned 37 in 1963; I cannot, for the life of me, picture him twirling a Hula Hoop at Arlington.

You may find that a hypocritical observation coming from a guy who is pushing 60 and still reading Captain America, but I stand by it. I am of the generation that invented youth culture, that spat in the eye of aging, that declined to stop having — or being — fun once the crow’s feet came; I’ve always felt that was one of the best things about us. We are, as Bob Dylan famously sang, “Forever Young.”

But I submit that there is a glaring difference between being forever young and forever immature.

And, that when you lack the common sense and simple decency to put your toys aside and stand awed in a place sanctified by suffering and sacrifice, you have crossed fully from the one to the other. Nor are you just immature. You’re shallow and self-centered, too. And you have no apparent capacity for reverence and reflection.

But you are hardly unique. We live in a world where many of us have longer and more soulful relationships with the screens in their palms than the people in their lives. They forget to look up sometimes. And they miss things because of it.

Important things. Painful things. Things that anchor us and lift us and bind us in shared humanity.

The Holocaust Museum is a memorial to 11 million people who died, 1.1 million of them at the camps that comprise Auschwitz. The National Sept. 11th Memorial and Museum remembers 2,977 people who perished in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Arlington National Cemetery is America’s most hallowed ground, final resting place for men and women who answered their country’s call.

These places and places like them deserve to be treated with respect.

And there’s something else I never thought I’d have to say.

 

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Photo: Theodore Belizaire plays the augmented reality mobile game “Pokemon Go” by Nintendo in Times Square, New York City, U.S. July 11, 2016. REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich

Survivors Return To Auschwitz As Leaders Warn Of Anti-Semitism

Survivors Return To Auschwitz As Leaders Warn Of Anti-Semitism

Oswiecim (Poland) (AFP) – Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, ageing survivors gathered at the site synonymous with the Holocaust on Tuesday as world leaders sounded the alarm over a fresh wave of anti-Semitism.

French President Francois Hollande and his Czech counterpart echoed warnings by a leading Jewish organisation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg over violence against Jews in modern-day Europe.

Telling French Jews that “France is your homeland,” Hollande described as “unbearable” the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in France, underscored by the Islamist killings at a kosher supermarket in Paris earlier this month.

Anti-Semitic acts in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, doubled in 2014 to 851 from the previous year, France’s main Jewish group CRIF said Tuesday.

The European Jewish Congress chief Moshe Kantor had warned that Europe is “close to” a new exodus of Jews, saying that “jihadism is very close to Nazism”.

Merkel said it was a “disgrace” that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats and violence, as she joined survivors Monday in Berlin to observe 70 years since the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz.

As he prepared to visit the camp, Spielberg, who won an Oscar for the Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, condemned “the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe”.

The director, who has also videotaped the testimony of 58,000 survivors, met with hundreds of them, mostly in their nineties, as they returned to Auschwitz for the liberation ceremonies on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Royals from Belgium and The Netherlands are expected to attend the event at Birkenau’s somber snow-cloaked crematorium memorial.

Hollande, German President Joachim Gauck and Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko are to participate in the commemoration along with a dozen other leaders, but Russia, the United States and Israel have chosen to send lower-ranking representatives.

Also attending is Celina Biniaz, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being placed on Oskar Schindler’s famous list.

Still elegant at 83, as a child she left the death camp to work in a nearby factory run by the German industrialist.

“I so wish they would settle that problem in the Middle East because I so believe that it has a definite impact on what’s happening with anti-Semitism all over Europe,” Biniaz, who came from California for the ceremonies, told AFP.

“The Muslims have been disenfranchised and their young have no hope for the future, so they are desperate and it sounds glamorous for them to join things like ISIS,” she said, referring to the Islamic State group.

However, Czech President Milos Zeman struck a different note by calling for further military action against the jihadists to prevent a “super Holocaust” with hundreds of millions of victims.

For another survivor David Wisnia, his return to Auschwitz is bringing on nightmares and flashbacks for the first time.

“It’s a lifetime ago really,” the 88-year-old said.

“Last night sleeping… I had a horrible dream and woke up and looked out the window and sort of thought that I was back in Birkenau in cell block 14 where I started in 1942.”

The grandson of the infamous Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess has also come.

“I can’t forgive my father or my grandfather. I’m completely different,” Rainer Hoess, who is devoted to fighting anti-Semitism, told reporters as he visited Auschwitz.

Roza Krzywolwocka-Laurow, 79, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 as an eight-year-old Polish partisan.

“If I survived it was to warn against this ever happening again,” she told AFP at the bullet-riddled “Wall of Death”, where the Nazis shot thousands.

Part of Adolf Hitler’s genocide plan against European Jews, dubbed the “Final Solution”, Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.

Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, some 1.1 million — mainly European Jews — perished, either in the gas chambers or by starvation or disease.

The Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe’s 11 million Jews.

Historical records show that by 1942, the Polish resistance provided Allied powers with eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Inexplicably, Washington and London failed to act.

“The debate as to why the Allies did not bomb the supply lines to Auschwitz remains unresolved,” survivor Marcel Tuchman told AFP.

“Whether there was a sinister reason behind it or whether it was just tactical, in that they didn’t want to divert their air force remains unclear,” the 93-year-old New York-based professor of medicine said.

“A little bomb in the proper place would have really helped.”

Photo: Survivors walk under the sign saying “Work makes you free” after paying tribute to fallen comrades at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2015 (AFP/Odd Andersen)