“All our choices were made to reflect and confront the present,” said Glazer, who is Jewish. “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
Geese, I thought, how can anyone—especially a fellow Jew—be so ignorant of the existential nature of Israel’s war against terror? And shame on him for using this otherwise joyful occasion to try making his inane point.
Then I saw the movie and loved it.
Set in 1943 at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, the film depicts the idyllic life camp commandant Rudolf Hoess led with his wife, Hedwig, and their five children while, just beyond the garden wall, untold thousands were slaughtered, shot, and gassed.
The point being, of course, that humans can remain willfully blind and unmoved by horrors happening right under their noses.
I was reminded of all that recently during my family’s summer vacation when we toured Auschwitz, now a memorial and museum near Krakow, Poland. And, sure enough, there sat that infamous little rose garden idling next to the lovely house hugging that bloody wall.
“My God,” I said to my wife, with whom I had just retraced the last steps of thousands who’d been marched to their deaths in the gas chambers, “it’s all so real.”
Kind of how I felt recently when Hamas brutally murdered six Israeli hostages within hours of their liberation.
During that same vacation, we also visited Chemnitz, the lovely city in what used to be communist East Germany, where my Jewish mother was born and raised. Though she and two siblings survived the Holocaust, both parents and a younger brother perished, probably at a place like Auschwitz.
Which is why I was taken aback by the headlines regarding last week’s elections in that part of Germany. “German Jews feel ‘sucker punched’ after first election of far-Right since Nazis,” the London Telegraph proclaimed.
“Germany is reeling,” Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews, was quoted as writing in the Bild newspaper. “Can we recover from this hit?”
The principal object of their concern is a relative newcomer to the political scene: Bjorn Hocke, head of Alternatives for Germany, a conservative party that made major gains.
Frankly, I don’t know enough about German politics to accurately gauge whether Hocke represents a real threat. On the one hand, his major issue seems to be unfettered Muslim immigration, which I certainly understand. But there are also disturbing reports of him using banned Nazi slogans and de-emphasizing memories of his country’s Fascist past.
Could Hocke’s popularity signal the beginnings of a new Nazi resurgence? And, anyway, what’s all that got to do with Israel?
Just this: that Israel was created in the wake of the Holocaust because Jews had nowhere else to turn. And that the murderous Hamas regime next door favors what would basically amount to another Holocaust. And, finally, that the world seems to be surrendering to the terrorists’ brazen strategy of putting civilians in harm’s way to assure maximum casualties it can then blame on Israel.
Last week, six innocent Israeli civilians got heinously murdered after nearly a year in captivity. And yet the world’s focus and pressure is not on the perpetrators who started this war, but on Israel to accept a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to persist.
By any sane reckoning, there should be only one demand, and it should be aimed at Hamas: surrender unconditionally and release all remaining hostages.
That would end the war immediately, allowing Israel to survive. Had the Jewish State existed in the 1930s, some of my relatives might still be alive.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
