Today is Yom Hashoah. It is a day of sadness for remembering
the many lives cut off so brutally by Hitler and the Nazis (May Their Names and
Heritages Be Erased From G-D ‘s Earth) But we should also make it a day to
rejoice that there are those who survived and bear witness to the atrocities
that were visited upon them and their families. That these people live and went
on to create and contribute to society and the world at large despite the
horrors of the Shoah is indeed a miracle – a nes directly from the Hand of
Hashem. Just imagine if there had been no one to survive. Just imagine if the
killing machine had done its work so completely and so efficiently that all
trace of Hashem and Hashem’s people had been wiped out. Unbelievable? Yes, but
the Nazis being the arrogant narcissistic megalomaniacs that they were, wanted
the world to know what they had done. They kept records. They were going to
create a museum about the Jewish people – the race that they were in the
process of destroying. So they knew what they were destroying was in essence,
worthy of acknowledgement and indeed they recorded the moments and the people.
They were trying to destroy the essential humanity in us
all. That which makes us G-dly beings worthy of being. The spirituality of our
essence was under threat like never before. G-D is about creation and love,
peace and harmony on the level of understanding that is beyond the power of
most of us to conceptualise. The core of creation is understanding that you are
at one with G-D, then the Universe and more, you can empathise and identify
with the pains, joys and emotional and psychological state of others and do not
do to them that which you would not want done to you.
There are flawed human beings with all sorts of different
psychological states at play in their interactions with others. This makes life
hard. Who was Hitler? A very damaged human being who needed affirmation in a
rather ugly and twisted way and used his charisma and gift of the gab to
corrupt the thinking of a nation. But the soil had already been turned many
times before so when he scattered the seeds of hatred, anger and contempt for
Jews and the Jewish nation, hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand years or more
of cultivation of these seeds fell into furrows that were ready to nurture it
to an awful fruition that nearly destroyed a whole civilization. Yet, for the
very talents and power of positive energy – G-D given that made them so hated
and so reviled by many, stuck in the drabness of lives devoid of spirituality,
this connection to a real G-D and spirituality allowed survival and helped the
survivors to know that they had survived for a reason.
You see, we are not slaves to dogma. Our G-D has empowered
us to know that He is G-D and we shall have no other. So we should also
celebrate today and bless and thank G-D that we have survivors to tell us, to
bear witness and we try to make the world a better and more humane place
despite the best efforts of those caught in a morass of negativity to drag us
all down into their pits of prejudice, anger, jealousy and hatred and to
enslave us.
Let me give a little parable. There was once a small boy at
a school. He was very different to some of the other kids and he got bullied
quite a bit. One of the teachers, tried to tell everyone that he was a stupid
boy and she even went so far as to tell the mother of the boy that he was
completely clueless. Partly because his
father belonged to a race of people that she holds certain prejudices against,
her opinion of the boy was coloured. Sometimes people cannot help their prejudices
and are good people despite it. However to reach that level of understanding
they have to acknowledge their limitations, their prejudices and rise beyond it
and try to deal with it. Denial is an ugly process. People who deny the Shoah
happened are continuing the work of the Nazis and their ilk. When you deny that
someone was bullied or your own prejudices you are not dealing with it or
trying to eradicate negative traits. You begin to foster and nurture negativity
and you stunt your own personal growth. I was asked not to bring my son to a
shule for possibly the same reasons. Simply prejudice and an attempt to deny
that there is something wrong with the way a person reacts to another.
We often mirror and reflect how people feel about us and we
do this from early childhood. Unless however we understand that at the core of
our essence is a moral order and substance and that we need to mould along the
lines of truth and honesty and to work in harmony with others. We need to accept that the other person is an
individual who has been created for a purpose. Once that acceptance takes place
then we can understand how to love another person without trying to make them
what we want.
So while we mourn, we should also celebrate that there are
survivors and that we can treasure these people and when we bear witness in
turn to their pain we understand how we must make the world a better place and
to ensure that such events do not occur again.
As a child, I read volume upon
volume of stories from a Life and Time series because my family are very avid
readers. My Uncle who remained single until he was 46 marrying a woman much
younger than himself, she was 27, has an extensive library. Out in the country
of an evening, there is not much to do apart from read. There are those who
drink themselves into a stupor but that was never what we did apart from a
small glass of sherry or a malt whiskey on the rocks or with soda, we read and
read and read. Uncle had perhaps
something like a few thousands of books both in his small bedroom off the
verandah at Warana and in book cases around the dining and sitting room as well
as the cook’s room down by the kitchen. My Uncles and my father’s reading
centred around politics, history and sciences. Yes there was some literature
but most of it was non fiction. The Shoah has some frightening stuff in it. I
remember at about seven or eight reading about Josef Mengle the man who
experimented on over 1500 pairs of identical twins of whom only 100 pairs could
be found after the war. What was striking about Mengle was the anomaly of his personality.
To those who had to assist him like Eptstein a Jewish paediatrician, he was
quite mad with the power he wielded over the inmates. Often he was kind to the
children he would later without a second thought kill and often painfully and
with no remorse or concept of humanity. He amputated and removed body parts as
though they were not part of a living creature and definitely not a fellow
human being. He was a monster maddened
by the ultimate (so he thought) power of life or death over others. Later he was to send a statement via a friend
“In 1960 Hans Sedlmeier returned
from Asuncion, Paraguay with a statement from Mengele that said, "I
personally have not killed, injured or caused bodily harm to anyone."
Mengele repeatedly insisted that he had not committed any crime, and that instead
he had become a victim of a great injustice.”
The greatest injustice would be to allow such an inhumane creature to deny
what he did to try and erase it from the annuls of history and allow him to go
free without retribution. A man who once killed fourteen sets of twins in a day
and dissected their bodies and also dissected the bodies of the still living. A
man who drew a line on the wall of the children’s barracks at 150 cm and any
child whose head did not reach it was sent to the gas chambers.
My mother is a non identical
twin. I often wondered about such a man and the lack
of humanity and how a person who is seemingly intelligent could do what this
man or indeed any Nazi did.
A Portrait of madness - creatures
of the void. They do not even look
normal.
The results of their vicious and
cruel work. The monster sewed these two
children together. The veins in their hands became gangrenous and they died in agony.
Poor little angels.
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