Lesson Learned from the Holocaust

Lesson Learned from the Holocaust

Introduction

It may seem strange that a hot month vacation, write it on the Nazi extermination camps in Poland and the Holocaust, tragic and shameful legacy of European civilization. Some will say it again!? I think it never hurts to go back to talking about the subject, about which I learned a lot in Poland, where I had the privilege of spending the first week of this August, part of a study trip, organized by the Association of Holocaust Memory and Education. Poland is full of history and memory, as indeed all the countries of Europe, but perhaps it may be said to be one where the recent past has been more dramatic.

It was the country where it started 70 years ago, World War II, the occupation by German troops of Hitler on September 1, 1939. It was also in Poland that unfolded the 'Operation Reinhard' code name of the German plan to murder the Jews who lived in the part of Poland occupied but not directly annexed by Germany. Within this 'transaction', the Nazis killed between March 1942 and November 1943, more than one million and a half Jews, the four death camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II . Only in the latter, a huge cemetery hidden among beautiful trees, after the Nazis reforest the area to hide the crime, they and their accomplices murdered over 800,000 Jews, between June 1942 and August 1943.

Discussion

In these four killing centers, which joined Majdanek in Poland, near Lublin and Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau), near Krakow, who were simultaneously the concentration camps and extermination. In Birkenau, were murdered, until November 1944, by Ziklon B, four gas chambers, almost one and a half million Jews in the countries occupied by Germany. These accounted for 90% of the victims of Auschwitz, including, among others, about 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 20,000 Roma and Sinti gypsies and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and many groups of other categories, including homosexuals.

In the extermination camps in Poland were murdered about 2.9 million Jews and nearly the entire Jewish population of that country, ie, about half the number of total Jews killed in the Holocaust. These numbers represent people, women and men, children, young and old, each with a short or long history and a singularity. These millions of people died for nothing (Avraham Milgram, who guided our study trip); were murdered simply because they were born Jews and because the Nazis decided to eliminate European Jewry. And the terrible thing is that partly succeeded, not only physically eliminate a huge part of the Jews of Poland and Europe, as there destroyed any traces of Jewish culture and religion. What one notices in Poland today, on the Jewish presence, is the very absence. In a climate of deafening silence, feels a great deal of sense of powerlessness. The same one that invades us before the recent massacres and genocides.

Admittedly, at Auschwitz I, the concentration becomes difficult due to the fact ...