YOM HASHOAH

Last night I attended the annual Yom HaShoah commemoration, as I have been doing for most of my life. When I was 9 I first went to what was then called the Warsaw Ghetto Commemoration evening at the Melbourne Town Hall with my Dad, who was a Holocaust survivor. I confess that, since most of the speeches were in Yiddish, I didn’t really get much of what was going on, but I got the gist of it.

I had stumbled on the Holocaust a year before while searching our bookshelves for something to read- I was a pretty avid reader- and I found The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool. 8 is pretty young to discover that such evil existed. There were some pretty awful pictures in it, which have haunted me until the present day, although I have since read many books and seen many films on the topic.

The annual Yom HaShoah commemoration evening has developed over the years into a kind of formula. There are songs sung in Yiddish and Hebrew by the children’s choirs of the Jewish day schools; there are the speeches from Jewish community leaders; there is the lighting of 6 memorial candles by survivors accompanied by children and grandchildren; and most important, there is testimony from a survivor. Kaddish is sung. The Partisan’s Hymn. HaTikvah.

Some years have included poetic and artistic musings from the 3^rd generation, ie grandchildren of survivors, about how the Holocaust affects them (snorts of derision from my father-in-law who is a survivor of Auschwitz, a Death March, and who was liberated from Buchenwald probably hours from death), but this year was mercifully free from these semi-masturbatory offerings. (I know, harsh.)

Every year there is something that doesn’t work. Some years the speeches are ludicrous, sometimes the candles won’t light, one year some kids fainted because they were kept standing too long waiting to come on to sing. One year a rather bluff fellow, a returned soldier- that was the year they were honoring Jews who fought- made a joke about meeting the Pope, showed some slides of the meeting, and said that the Pope was the one wearing the yarmulke. This went down like the proverbial lead balloon. (Take note: do not make any jokes if asked to speak at Yom HaShoah.)

This year, apart from some candles which refused to stay alight, the one thing that jarred was the fellow who talked about the lessons learned from the Holocaust and how we must not be bystanders to genocide. His organization, Jewish Aid, has raised a lot of money and this money is used to help Sudanese refugees integrate into Australian society. Jewish kids and parents help the Sudanese adults and kids with reading and crafts and whatnot, and there were some pictures of smiling black be-hijabbed women and children with Jewish kids and mums all being tolerant and tolerated and Family of Man; all very kumbaya. So I have just reread what I have written and I can see that this is a very nice thing to do. What it has to do with not being a bystander to genocide, I don’t know. What it has to do with Jews, apart from the fact that the Jew has an innate desire to make the world a better place- I don’t know. Surely there are also non-Jews who are doing this? Are fellow Muslims helping them? If not,why not?

I guess my point is that Yom HaShoah is not about Sudanese refugees who have found safe harbour here. It is about remembering the 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, who were murdered by the Nazis and their willing accomplices, and –yes- by the indifference of the world. There has been a lot of shit which has gone down since WW2, including the Rwandan genocide, but really, nothing touches what the Nazis perpetrated on the Jews in terms of planning, intent and sheer scale. This is the 70^thyear since the Wannsee Conference, where 15 Nazi bureaucrats sat around a table in a nice house near Berlin, and in a meeting which took less than 90 minutes out of their busy schedules, discussed ‘Die Endlösung der Judenfrage’-‘The Final Solution to theJewish Question’. Of course, by 1942, many Jews (and other unfortunates, starting with the mentally ill, the crippled, as well as dissidents, Gypsies, gays and others- I haven’t forgotten them) had already been starved, shot, gassed, worked to death in slave labour camps etc. But the ever-efficient and educated Germans had to have more Ordnung going; a time frame, a method, a goal, facts and figures. And what is the definition of a Jew? 2 Jewish grandparents? One? Married to a non-Jew, but culturally Jewish? Or assimilated? Or having fought for Germany in WW1? Hmm, so many nuances which must be defined and dealt with. After this meeting they all enjoyed a nice glass of cognac and went on their way. One of these hearties was Adolf Eichmann, and we all know about him, what he did and how he ended up. But three of these 15 lived well into old age because nobody could get the accusation of war crime to stick, so they went free.

In Rwanda, 800,000 people were murdered by their neighbours, mainly by machete. That is horrific and unimaginable, but it doesn’t come near to the Holocaust for many reasons. In all the appalling history of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, the Holocaust stands out like a rocky peak in a bleak desert.

So on Yom HaShoah, let us remember the 6 million Jews who were murdered only because they were Jewish. Let us pledge ‘Never Again’. Let there be many more beautiful Jewish children born, children who will grow up and become responsible human beings who will continue to strive to make the world a better place. And let us think of ways to strengthen Israel, because, if push comes to shove, that’s what we have, that’s where we go, that’s what would have saved a lot of Jews had the State of Israel been around in 1936. And Allah bless the Sudanese, and hats off to the Jews who help them, but let’s not lose our priorities either.

Am Yisrael Chai.