THE rest of the world didn’t lift a finger when the Nazis were herding Jews to the death camps and have a way of being silent accomplices when the wheels of misery grind people – of all colours and races, across continents – to death, or worse, debased existence.
Never again was the slogan the global community raised against the horror of the gas chambers. But the memory of the Holocaust has failed to be the moral compass of the world.
We thought that genocide would be taboo after Auschwitz. That was not to be.
We are reminded of the Holocaust when we count bodies in Darfur, in the Balkans and Rwanda. We are forced to invoke the evil of the gas chambers when murders are legitimised in the name of imagined insults, religion, caste and tribal loyalties.
It is indeed Auschwitz that comes alive when Sharon orders his tanks to roll over Palestinian villages.
For Auschwitz isn’t just a Jewish memory. It is about a body that has lost its soul; of nations that dispossess people of land, identity, the right to live and dissent.
Auschwitz, to borrow philosopher Hannah Arendt’s words, is about the banality of evil.
Evil continues to manifest itself in various forms – as the revenge of the “victim”, the might of the rich over the poor, the ideology of totalitarianism.
Memory is not meant to be archived. It has to be historicised and contemporarised.
For rulers like Sharon, history ceased to exist at Auschwitz.
Many like him, even in Australia, think that the future is all about memory. Frozen memory is stale history; it can corrupt the present.
The world needs to remember Auschwitz not just to pay homage to the dead but also to remind ourselves what evil humans are capable of.
To prevent Auschwitz is to fight all evil; irrespective of how distant its perpetrator and victim are from our mindscape.
In his speech marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Sharon said that the lesson from the death camp was “no one cared that the Jews were being killed”.
The world hasn’t changed. It still prefers to sleep over the slaughter of innocents when that takes place outside the “civilised” First World – the toll at Darfur is estimated to be over 70,000.
It is essential to remember Pastor Martin Niemoller’s lines: “When they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me”.
CHRISTOPHER MADEIRA
Aspley, Qld
