The Enduring Holocaust

Here speaks irony. That Nazi Germany even while it was in the throes of fighting for its very existence when its plans for world domination through the Third Reich began to fall apart - when the Allies started to edge toward winning the battle against ultimate Fascism - still remained fixated on destroying European Jewry. Germany took increasingly scarce resources away from the war effort to devote to its malevolent task of ridding the world of Jews.

And the Allies, knowing by that time full well what was being planned for European Jews, knowing what had been accomplished - and it was devastatingly considerable - simply could not manage to spare war-time resources to halt the killing machine by taking the transport systems out of commission, by bombing the crematoria, by utilizing any means to slow down the orderly and determined mass execution of the Jews.

Dreadful information had been seeping out to the world about what was happening in the death camps. If it were just a question of slave labour, starvation, working people to death, dread disease running rampant through concentration camps, it would have represented a horrible enough indication of man's inhumanity to man, through a concerted effort to commit genocide by ridding the world of its hated Jews.

The knowledge was there, the full horror of what was proceeding apace. But the will was not there for those civilized countries of the world - who did rigorous battle with a delusional, hateful Nazi ideology that was intent on installing itself as a master race and subjugating the rest of the world to its will as lesser human beings - to come to the aid of the beleaguered Jews.

They could fend for themselves - and some did, joining resistance groups if they were able to escape the prison camps, and by organizing uprisings in the ghettos and resisting to the last of their fading energies and hopes, the catastrophic will of a powerful enemy to destroy them. A people destined for annihilation, hoping the world would notice and might care.

The world did notice, but it did not care.

When what was left of the inmates of concentration camps ultimately found freedom from their certain fate, the world wrung its hands in despair that human beings could descend to such depths of depravity. And of course, there were many who claimed themselves to be innocent of the knowledge of what was occurring. In the death camps outside of Germany the indigenous population claimed they were themselves victims, how could they assist the Jews?

Not that, in Poland, in Lithuania, in Ukraine, in Austria, in Latvia, in Estonia, in Germany, people were unaware of the camps and their purpose. But they pleaded innocence; there was nothing they could do, they were themselves occupied peoples. And they did suffer. And some rare individuals did care, and did lend themselves to securing Jewish lives.

But Europe was never free of anti-Semitism, and the Nazi propaganda machine churned out proof of Jews as being sub-human, a canker living within Europe, deserving of extermination, to make the world a finer place. And there were many who applauded that effort, willing and eager to assist, apart from those who simply had no opinion and didn't much care.

From villagers whose meagre lives were deleteriously impacted by the war, to socialites who had designs on the property of Jews, easily acquired through confiscation, and elite religious figures who never much liked the Jews in any event, a general aura of complicity ensued; better the Jews than them, in any event.

With the creation of the State of Israel as a singular haven for world Jewry which the United Nations sanctioned finally to expunge a sense of collective guilt for inaction when it was needed, Jews knew they had a homeland reflective of their heritage. Now world events have come full circle, and once again the Jews are despised and slandered, and with the return of anti-Semitism has come the stealthy and effective de-legitimization of Israel.

Jews as the perennial scapegoat of the world. Guilty by birth of all that is implied they plot to achieve. World domination, of course.

By securing the world's news networks, banking systems and claiming exceptionality as victims of the Holocaust. The six million men, women and children who were sacrificed to the alter of hatred have scarcely been replenished. The memory of their horrendous fate has dimmed; the world no longer cares.

And in Israel, a haven not only for Jews, but for Christians in an increasingly hostile Middle East, and a place which offers equality and justice to all its citizens; Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, the struggle for survival continues.