Every year, Israel commemorates Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. It’s actually a number of events, which this year runs from the April 23 – 27. Rachel tells me that at “10am sirens are sounded in each corner of Israel. Everything, everyone stops. Nothing moves for 1 minute”. She pauses; “The whole country feels like it’s dead”.
The setting couldn’t be more homely. A nondescript villa, and inside a group of men are enjoying drinks, cigars and snacks, after what one of them described was a well deserved “rest after long hours of effort”. They had just concluded the Wannsee Conference, named after this suburb of Berlin. The date is January 20, 1942, and the meeting had been chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, an SS and Gestapo leader. A momentous decision had been taken; to put into action the ‘The Final Solution’. This was to fulfil what Hitler had promised; “The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews”.
The Germans then created an intricate, orderly and efficient method of implementing this scheme. Bestial experiments on prisoners led them to opt for mass gassings in concentration camps. The result was the genocide of six million Jews.
Who were so inhuman as to implement this atrocity? Kurt Waldheim was an officer of the Wermacht Army, and would personally interrogate prisoners who were then sent to die in the Jasenovac concentration camp located in Yugoslavia.
The only peculiarity of this region was that within it operated some of the most fearsome SS divisions ever assembled, made up of volunteer Bosnian Muslims, who were “most effective” in eliminating Jews. This is one of the still largely unspoken secrets of World War II. Like many German and Austrian officers, Waldeheim, a war criminal, escaped trial after 1945.
His was in fact the most brazen case, as he went on to become the Austrian President ( 1986–1992 ), and most shockingly of all he had earlier served as the United Nations secretary general ( 1972–1981 ). It is therefore no wonder that the UN developed a habit of overlooking dictators, while wavering in the face of genocides such as the one in Cambodia or Rwanda. Instead, the UN focuses on laying opprobrium on the only democracy in the Middle East; Israel.
One of former US President Barack Obama’s last decisions in office was to abandon Israel during a crucial UN Security Council resolution (No 2334 ), an act that undermines the latter’s survival.
Israel is the only country that can ensure that Jews will never again be victims of genocide. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, the most notorious of all camps, immortalised the devastation of Jews in his books.
In Moments of Reprieve, he revisits his postwar contact with his former German overseer; “I told him that if Hitler rose to power, devastated Europe and brought Germany to ruin, it was because many good German citizens behaved the way he did, trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see”. In turn, historians like Martin Gilbert, work tirelessly to unearth and preserve the facts of that macabre era.
Winston Churchill was the first Allied leader who grasped what was earlier considered too unimaginable to be true. In 1944 he wrote, “There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world”. A belated realisation.
Many Jews willingly joined Allied forces that were taking on the Axis Powers, and fought on all fronts. During the Victory Day Celebrations in London, there was a massive parade, mainly of Commonwealth armies. Only one Jew, his ethnicity unknown to the organisers, but famous for his valour, had been chosen by sheer chance as the flagbearer of the King’s African Rifles, who were mainly from Kenya. When he tells me about this, it is palpable in his eyes that this represented a triumph. He exclaims; “I did it for all Jewish soldiers”.
On the outskirts of Nairobi, over 60 years ago an area was named after him; Kwa-Ruben (At Reuben’s). Here, today, nobody remembers why.