The Children Cry

"The children cry, and I tell them to talk to their parents and brothers and sisters and ask them why do we do it and why do we hate?"
"We mustn't forget what happened."
Zygmunt Shipper, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor

"Shortly after World War II, after we saw the reality of Auschwitz and the other death camps, no normal person wanted to be associated with the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. But, as the Holocaust grows more distant and survivors disappear, extremists grow more bold in targeting Jews. Stoked by a false narrative that blames Israel for a litany of the world's problems, anti-Semitism is resurgent and deadly."
Ronald Lauder, president, World Jewish Congress

Children stand behind a barbed wire fence at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz as it is liberated by the Red Army   (Keystone/Getty Images)

Zygmont Shipper planned to travel to southern Poland to pay homage to the millions of Jews whom the Third Reich succeeded in exterminating on its way to the Final Solution; ridding the world of the presence of Jews. Ten years earlier it could be anticipated that one and a half thousand survivors of the Holocaust's unspeakable atrocities would travel to Auschwitz at the 60th anniversary of its liberation. Now, 70 years after the death camp's liberation organizers anticipate the presence of 300 survivors.

Mr. Shipper has been travelling Britain to share his story of survival with school groups. As long as he can still manage to get out and about, he plans to speak as often as he can. To ensure that the memory doesn't dim, that people will not forget the efficiently organized genocide that took six million Jews out of the world; that is six million men, women and children, and of course any number of successors born of those who might have lived, but whom fate deigned would not.

Children who survived Auschwitz show their tattooed identification numbers   (Reuters)

With the growing proliferation of immigration from countries of the Middle East to Western democratic countries, anti-Semitism has proliferated and is downright thriving. Enmities, rancidly bitter and given to violence has travelled with those who leave their countries of origin where increasingly Jews are denigrated, slandered and threatened. To take the psychosis of hatred to a larger population convinced that the State of Israel has mistreated Palestinians, and in their zeal to 'take sides', adapting themselves anew to the bigotry of Jew-hating.

What irony; Western anti-Semitism that reached its height of viciously hateful destruction in civilized Germany where Jews prided themselves on being German, lauding its culture, its literature, its music and science, leading to the exquisitely planned and executed mass eradication of European Jewry, led, post-war, to the creation of the State of Israel, from the ashes of the historical heritage of the Jewish people.

That resulted in Jews living in Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa for millennia, being disenfranchised of their citizenship, robbed of their possessions, and forced to migrate for haven to Israel. The assault against Islam with the creation of a Jewish State on land consecrated to Islam, forbidden by Islamic decree, ensured that Israel and its population of Jews would be regarded as enemies by its neighbours who assembled their armies to destroy the state.

Now, it is Israel that so many in the West consider the aggressor, that title handed it by virtue of its presence in the Middle East, not because it has launched attack after attack on its neighbours. But because it has a military whose purpose is defence and security of the nation and its people, a country whose mission in its existence is to provide a safe haven for Jews, Israel's success in defending itself has led to increased anti-Semitism.

The liberal-left apologists for Palestinian and Arab violence against Israel, justify their stance by citing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, as 'occupiers' of land offered to the Palestinians through the UN-sponsored Partition plan, which the Palestinians rejected outright, preferring to await the outcome of the assembled Arab armies' assault against the nascent state. The 'occupation' primarily protects Israel against Palestinian violence, in the absence of a peace treaty.

With Israel, as it is with Jews, it is always back to square one.

One Holocaust concluded and dimming in memory, another looms on the horizon as the Islamic Republic of Iran vows to destroy the Jewish state, and in its dedication to the task it has set itself, it has launched terrorist groups into action to soften the target, from Hezbollah to Hamas, awaiting the time when a pincer-movement of allied militias answering to Iran, supported by countries like Sudan, Venezuela and North Korea cheering on the axis of Iran, Syria and Lebanon visualize a new Holocaust.