The Holocaust; a human tragedy that must never happen again

by Maj (ret'd) CORNELIU. CHISU, CD, PMSC, FEC, CET, P. Eng. Former Member of Parliament Pickering-Scarborough East As we deal with increasing instability in the world, especially the surging military activity, we need to reflect for a moment on the human tragedy of cataclysmic proportion that occurred during World War II (WW2) and hope that this never happen again. It is hard to believe that in 2024 we will mark the 79th Anniversary of the end of WW2; a tragedy that claimed many victims and was the most devastating event of the last century. That war was the deadliest military conflict in human history. It is estimated that a total of 70 to 85 million people perished, which represented about 3% of the world population in 1940. The WW2 conflagration saw very high civilian casualties. Civilian deaths totaled 50 to 55 million. Close to 25 million of these were victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Around 17 million perished as victims of the Nazi Germany regime and its collaborators. The ferocity of killings by Nazis and their collaborators was rationalized as ethnic cleansing. These were racially motivated crimes, involving the persecution of Roma and the handicapped, the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, as well as political prisoners, religious dissenters, and homosexuals; all combining to increase the number of innocent victims of war. In January 1942, top Nazi leaders convened a meeting in the outer lakeside Berlin suburb of Wannsee. There, they outlined the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe”, without regard for geographic boundaries. In total, 11 million Jews would be targeted for extermination. Without a whimper, the thirteen officials signed off on the ‘Final Solution’. The minutes would record their decision to ‘cleanse the German living space of Jews in a legal manner’. This marked the darkest seminal moment in a series of events that would see the murder of 6 million Jews; an abhorrence beyond the comprehension of our modern, comfortable lives. The Holocaust is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during WW2. Entire families, old men and women and young children were killed in the Nazi extermination camps by ferocious and inhumane methods. According to Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers, 2,830,000 Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camps (500,000 in Belzec; 150,000 in Sobibor; 850,000 in Treblinka; 150,000 in Chelmno; 1,100,000 in Auschwitz and 80,000 in Majdanek. In the Nazi occupied territory of the USSR the Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed another 1.4 million Jewish people by mobile gas chambers and mass executions. Seventy-nine years ago, on 27 January 1945, Soviet soldiers from the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front advanced into Poland and liberated Auschwitz. There, amid mountains of corpses, they discovered about 7,650 men, women and children; starving, stricken by disease, barely living. They also found hundreds of thousands of personal effects including items of clothing like shoes, and 700 tonnes of human hair. The broken human beings they liberated were among the handful of survivors of the 1.3 million people who had passed through the gates of Auschwitz. From my city of birth, Satu Mare in Transylvania, there were 4 train loads of Jewish people deported directly to Auschwitz between May and June 1944. Most of them perished. In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 27 January 1945, the day on which Auschwitz was liberated, as International Remembrance Day to mark the tragedy of the Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others, by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It urges every member nation of the U.N. to honour the memory of Holocaust victims, and encourages the development of educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide. It condemns all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. The International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is thus a day on which we must reassert our commitment to human rights. We must also go beyond remembrance, and make sure that new generations know this history. After the horrors of the 20th century, there should be no room for intolerance in the 21st. The only way to honour the memory of the Holocaust is to turn remembrance into the promise of a better future. Preserving and transmitting the memory is a duty towards those who lost their lives, and towards our children. In commemorating the dead, we are inspired by the triumph of the human spirit given us by those who survived. “We study history not to be clever in another time, but to be wise always.” Marcus Tullius Cicero A nation that does not know nor understand its history is dangerous. Life’s paradox is that often it is those things, most important to us, that we have a tendency to take for granted. We are fortunate as Canadians, whether by birth or by choice, to enjoy and appreciate political, economic and religious freedoms. To live in a nation in which faith coexists with reason, free academic inquiry, a free press and independent judiciary is a blessing that we need to preserve. And yet support for democracy is diminishing. We are defined most clearly by our values and our beliefs, the way we relate to one another and see our place in the world. We are shaped by our heroes and villains, our triumphs and failures. How, as a people we have faced adversity, and how we will face the inevitable adversities that are coming. How we respond to them will shape our future. Nations, like people, face ‘moments of truth’. There are moments in history which challenge our very survival and values. Well led, we emerge stronger, more resilient. Otherwise we may suffer lasting damage. Six million Jews were murdered in an act of unspeakable genocidal barbarism. So too were homosexuals, Roma, the disabled and political dissidents. In a world grappling with the mass movement of people, the persecution of political, ethnic and religious minorities, the push for euthanasia and a generational struggle against resurgent religious extremism, we must remind ourselves not only of why we fought wars, but also what human kind is capable of, and the circumstances that lead to it. Today we live in vast ignorance of the decisions we make and that are made for us, facing extraordinary global uncertainty and immense technological change. No human being, no Canadian who believes in the dignity of man, in freedom and democratic principles, should ever allow the Holocaust to be forgotten through neglectful indifference; that the events, the people, their lives and stories, become a distant stranger. These heinous events and those who survived them teach us many things. Most importantly they inspire us to have the moral courage, irrespective of personal consequences, to act on what, in our hearts, we know to be right. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” Elie Wiesel Are we ready?