Has there ever been an event in world history more hateful than the Holocaust, the Nazis’ extermination of European Jews as Hitler’s evil Third Reich extended its death grip across continental Europe in the late 1930’s and 1940’s.
Holocaust survivors are becoming fewer as these atrocities occurred over sixty years ago, but their memories are for all of us to study carefully and take to heart as their pain and sacrifice sets a standard for all humanity of the kinds of hatred and oppression the world can never even remotely tolerate again.
How purely vile it is that when a group of Nazi death camp survivors gathered at the site of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria where 345,000 Jews were slaughtered by murderous madmen to mark the 64th anniversary of the camp’s liberation would be subject to a vicious attack by Neo Nazis screaming “Heil Hitler” and “This way for the gas!” taunting and terrorizing ten elderly Italian and fifteen French survivors. The thugs dressed in camouflage also fired air guns to further terrorize their victims. In total, at least 7000 survivors from 42 countries participated in this solemn memorial. There is no language to express just how hateful what the two separate altercations against the Italian and French group endured.
The civilized world must give the holocaust survivors every accommodation in their final years to let them give testimony to the horrors they faced by the forces of pure evil in their lifetime.
We cannot ignore that the same kind of hatred that propelled the German Nazis is alive today whether in the form of hate groups like the Neo-Nazis, political terrorist movements like Al Qaeda, or state sponsored hatred as witnessed by the rhetoric coming from the Iranian government.
It doesn’t matter where people live in polite society today, the notion that “it can’t happen here” is a dangerous illusion. As the economic struggles in the United States continues, stand on guard for who might be identified as convenient scapegoats. Those forces live among us.
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