Dear readers
Today, on the 27:th of January 2015, it is 70 years since the prisoners in Auschwitz was freed. 70 years since the pain and suffering, the slaughtering, the complete ignorance of human value came to happen.
We are told that this was a result of pure evil, that this was complete madness and that it can never happen again.
Let’s get confused.
I look back and read the story of the psychologist and writer Hédi Fried. At the age of nineteen she got deported to Auschwitz together with her family. Hédi had a happy childhood in Northern Romania. In 1940, the Nürnberg-laws prevented her family and all other Jews from having any income. The family got poor, but Hédi says that they adjusted and could live a normal life. Then, in the spring of 1944, the Jews were forced to wear the yellow star. Shortly afterwards, they were moved to ghettos and then to concentration camps.
Hédi and her family came to Auschwitz, and from the train they got pushed down on the so called selection ramp. As women and men were parted, Hédi had no chance to say goodbye to her father. Shortly afterwards, Josef Mengele stood before Hédi. He directed Hédi and her sister in one way – and their mother in another. Hédis mother begged for understanding.
– We are a family. They are my children, we want to be together.
– Yes, yes, you will go with a car, you’ll see them later, Mengele replied.
When Hédis mother begged for water, Josef Mengele replied that she would get coffee soon.
The ninety-year-old Hédi tells us that “coffee” meant the gas coming out of the taps in the ceiling.
Hédi and her sister were taken to another area, where they got their bodies and heads shaved. After an ice-cold shower they sat down to wait for their mother. Many prisoners sat beside them, waiting for parents, younger siblings and other loved ones. Wondering when they would come, a girl told them:
– Are you stupid? Do you see the chimney over there? There, over there, your parents and siblings are burning.
Hédi and her sister were sent to many different camps, until they finally got freed and came to Sweden with help from the Red Cross.
In her self biography Hédi writes that she thought that the world had learned it’s lesson after the Holocaust. But then Rwanda happened, and Balkan, and today we see both racism and antisemitism.
Today, Hédi writes, I am scared again.
Forgetting the Holocaust means forgetting the unbelievable suffering and pain brought to millions of people. Forgetting means to not learn from the past. Forgetting means that what has happened can happen again.
“I tell my stories, so that young people will listen and understand that when you make a difference between people and people, in the end it will lead to a Holocaust.”
As I am writing this, a new day is starting. Today, 70 years ago, was the first day the prisoners of Auschwitz woke up free. They were survivors, but they had – or have – scars that time is unable to heal.
But we, us human beings, can prevent new scars from ever being made.
Let’s open our eyes. Let’s see the threat around us – and the threat is not other people, religions or cultures. The threat is fear, discrimination and hate.
And we have to fight this threat with everything we’ve got.
Because we know what will happen if we don’t.
getconfused 