1K for Today: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

"I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings." - Oskar Schindler

On the first of November, 2005, the United Nations through it's Resolution 60/7 designated the twenty-seventh of January as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Growing up in India in the eighties and nineties, I was largely unaware as to what the Holocaust was. As far as I can recall even the school textbooks on history spoke little about the Holocaust in the chapters relating to World War II. I doubt if the textbooks have changed since then.

The Holocaust was the systematic genocide of an estimated six million Jews across Europe by the Nazi regime during the period extending from the mid-1930s up to 1945. Six million! To put things into perspective that is roughly the present day population of a city like Ahmedabad or Chennai; it is as much as the present day population of countries such as Denmark or Finland or the Congo. Two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe in 1939 was wiped out in six years. While the Holocaust was horrible in itself, it accounted for just over ten per cent of the total civilian deaths for World War II. While Anti-Semitism had existed for centuries in Europe, under the Nazi regime, it reached unprecedented heights. Starting in 1933, the Jews were systematically excluded from business, art and political life. After 1938-39, as the Nazi army invaded country after country, Jews were pushed into isolated Ghettos. Concentration camps and later, extermination camps were created to facilitate the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In the infamous extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, almost two million people were killed, a majority of them, Jews; this was carried out over a period of around four and a half years, averaging at about five hundred deaths a day!

Spoiler Alert

I was introduced to this most sad story of human history by the book, 'Mila 18' by Leon Uris. Based on real events, the novel is named after an address, ‘Ulica Mila 18’ or ’18, Mila Street’ the location of an underground bunker that served as the headquarters of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw. The story arcs through the invasion of Poland and the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jews of the Ghetto organize an armed struggle culminating in events that parallel the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Several of the characters in the novel are loosely based on actual people including the protagonists, Alexander Brandel, who is loosely based on Polish-Jewish scholar, historian and politician, Emmanuel Ringelblaum; and Andrei Androfski, who is based on Mordechai Anielewicz.

A few years later, I watched for the first time, Steven Spielberg’s moving masterpiece, ‘Schindler’s List’. Based on a book called ‘Schindler’s Ark’ by Thomas Keanelly, the movie tells the story of the Schindlerjuden, Jews who survived the Holocaust largely due to the efforts of a German businessman and industrialist, Oskar Schindler. The movie, shot entirely in black and white, is tragic and poignant, heart-wrenching and yet, inspiring. Oskar Schindler an ostentatious and rich German businessman becomes a member of the Nazi Party. He bribes his way into setting up an enamelware factory in Krakow and starts to use Jews from the Krakow Ghetto as labor. At the same time, Krakow is being overseen by Nazi lieutenant, Amon Goth under whom, the Plaszow Concentration Camp is built. Goth later oversees the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto, portrayed in a fifteen-minute sequence of horror. Schindler's factory is an utter failure, never producing anything of quality, but he uses it to save the Jews, while sparring ideologically with the ruthless Goth. In the end as the war draws to a close and the Red Army approaches from the East, the Germans have to stand down and free the Jews. Knowing that Schindler will be prosecuted for being a member of the Nazi Party, the Jews give him a letter proclaiming his good deeds.

Many people much more qualified than me have written and reviewed this masterpiece in great length, yet there are some scenes that are absolutely haunting and refuse to recede from memory which I wish to recall here. Among these are scenes of Schindler searching for his plant manager, Itzhak Stern (in a magnificent performance by Ben Kingsley) as he is bundled into a train to be taken away to a concentration camp; the long sequence of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, including the famous girl in a red coat; the scene of women riding a train car in fear as it pulls through a bleak snowy landscape; and the one scene where Amon Goth tries to shoot a Jew in the back of the head with a jammed pistol. Some lines from the script are unforgettable as well. In an argument with Goth over power, Schindler says "Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't." In the end, when the Red Army approaches Krakow and the Ghetto has been dissolved, Schindler is being sent away by the freed and surviving Jews. They present him a ring, made of gold gathered from volunteers who chose to give away the gold from their dental fillings. On the inside of the ring is an engraving. Itzhak Stern explains "It's Hebrew. It's from the Talmud. It says 'Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire'."

The Holocaust was a terrible, terrible crime committed against a people. There have no doubt, been many crimes of genocide committed, both in the past, and since then. Entire peoples were virtually wiped out during the European colonization of the Americas, a population of an estimated eight million. Conquerors all over the world have ruthlessly killed entire populations. Yet moral codes in the past were different, and they were not as universal as they have been since the beginning of the twentieth century. Pacts such as the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights have binded regimes into sticking to a broad moral code with respect to human rights. But the strife and suffering have not ceased, genocides under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda come to mind.  

In the recent past and closer to home, the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh resulted in deaths estimated to be between three hundred thousand and three million. As many as twenty-nine thousand Sikhs are estimated to have perished in the killings across North India after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The ongoing genocide against Muslim Rohingyas by the Buddhist regime of Myanmar has resulted in the deaths of an estimated forty-three thousand people. Ironically, Buddhism itself is a religion of peace. It would do well for us to remember this day not just the Holocaust, but to the utter horrors that hatred and bigotry can cast on the world.

Sources:

1. United States General Assembly Resolution 60/7: https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/60/7

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll

3. For quotes from the movie Schindler's List: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/quotes/?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu