A furious debate has broken out in Italy after the decision of Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, to change the captions under the museum’s display on the wartime pope, Pius XII.

On October 16, 1943, over 1,000 members of Rome’s Jewish community were taken to death camps, without a word of condemnation from the pope, who lived in the Vatican, only streets away from the Jewish ghetto. Pius XII’s wartime role has been the subject of considerable criticism, made more complex because of the continued refusal of the Vatican to open its archives so that scholars can establish definitively what the pope did or did not do.

But now Yad Vashem has altered the captions on its wartime Vatican display to reflect the latest academic thinking — and has strongly rebutted suggestions that it did so due to Vatican pressure.

Its spokesman said: “Recently, following the recommendation of the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the panel regarding the wartime activities of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII has been updated. This is to reflect research that has been done in recent years, and presents a more complex picture than previously presented”. It added pointedly: “Yad Vashem looks forward to the day when the Vatican archives will be open to researchers so that a clearer understanding of the events can be arrived at.”

But Riccardo Di Segni, chief rabbi of Rome, expressed his indignation. He said: “It is hard to believe that the new wording is not the result of pressure from the Vatican. It is not acceptable that bureaucrats, diplomats, and maybe even politicians, deem the Vatican’s demands more important than our painful memories”.

Supporting the Yad Vashem scholars, the distinguished Jewish Italian historian Anna Foa said: “I do not think that the new panel has softened its account of Pius XII’s role. In my view, the update acknowledges the fact that we are still in the middle of an open debate.”

The outgoing Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Mordechai Lewy, during his last press conference before returning to Israel, denied his involvement in the Yad Vashem decision.

But these explanations have not persuaded Rome’s chief rabbi. He told Yad Vashem: “If you have documents, let other academics and other people know them. Please try to understand the impact of your decision on our community. They are not historians, they suffered because of history. They can change their opinion, but they need facts and documents”.

* Rossella Tercatin is a reporter for Pagine Ebraiche, the magazine of Italian Jewry

Rohatyn remembered some wonderful anecdotes during a meeting with the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF) intended to videotape his testimony. He recalled the time when a German officer failed to take a good look at their papers because he was lighting a cigarette and when he used to hide gold coins inside the toothpaste tubes. Still, how his step-father got the visas that would allow the family to escape from France, as well as the identity of the diplomat who provided them with the papers, has been a mystery to him until recently.

Among the many documents from the Brazilian State Department (Itamaraty) and the Brazilian National Archives that historian Fabio Koifman uncovered when researching the life and deeds of diplomat Luiz Martinz de Souza Dantas for his book ”Quixote nas Trevas,” a list of the people who benefit from Dantas’ visas was discovered. Felix Rohatyn was one of them.

When the Wallenberg Foundation approached Rohatyn with the information a few years ago, he was astounded, ”I waited 50 years of my life to know how I got my Visa and now I know.” ”We were terribly grateful. I know that he took personal danger because Vargas was not a great fan of the Jews. These people were taking risks and Souza Dantas suffered a lot,” said Rohatyn after learning about Souza Dantas role in his survival.

Dantas granted diplomatic visas to enter Brazil to hundreds of people who, from the point of view of the Brazilian immigration policy, were considered undesirable. An investigation opened by the administrative department of the public service headed by Vargas accused Dantas of granting irregular visas. In an Itamaraty telegram, the diplomat affirmed in his defense that he did not grant ”even a visa” after the prohibition. It was a lie. Dantas’ lack of fear was proven by evidence of visas issued in January 1941 -a month after the prohibition- but with false information. With his actions, Dantas saved about 800 people from extermination.

Armed with Dantas’ visas, Rohatyn and his family crossed the Atlantic en route to Brazil. Yet the country was against Jewish immigration and Rohatyn’s family decided it would be better to move to the US. After the war, Rohatyn’s family went back to France, but he decided to attend college in the US. After spending some time in the army and the Korean War, Rohatyn graduated from school and started to look for a job, ”my stepfather knew Andrew Meyer who was a senior partner of Lazard Frères and said, ‘Listen I have a step son and he’s not very bright, but could you give him a job for a year or something?’”

The rest of the story is well known. Rohatyn went to work at Lazard in New York and worked there for forty years. Still, he is aware that none of his would have been possible without the Brazilian visas issued by Dantas, ”If I haven’t got those Visas I would have seen the gas chamber in Auschwitz,” he concludes.

The title of Mr. Rainer’s address was: ”The legacies of Raoul Wallenberg and other rescuers of the Holocaust”.

Mr. Rainer introduced the mission and activities of the Wallenberg Foundation and highlighted the research work performed by its volunteers, including the Slawinska and Reszeli cases, as well as the Turkish and Spanish diplomats who served in France and other countries during WWII.

Following his lecture, Mr. Rainer answered a series of questions posed by the audience.

One of the most remarkable stories is that of Mr. Poser’s grandmother. She was rescued by the Consul of Denmark in Norway, Hans Henning Schroeder, who granted her a visa to Denmark. ”Schroeder ‘coached’ my grandmother about what to say”, said Poser, ”he told her that since her husband died in Denmark and therefore had Danish and not Norwegian citizenship, according to the laws of the time, she was in fact Danish too”.

Freed from the prison where she was held with other Norwegian Jews, Poser’s grandmother went to Denmark with Consul Schroeder’s help, only to be rescued again in October 1943, as part of the large scale rescue operation that saved almost all Danish Jews.

Schroeder was later the Consul General of Denmark in New York.

”It is a great honor to be here as the current Consul General and to talk about and honor a former Consul General in New York”, said Ambassador Torben A. Gettermann, as he gave a historic overview of the political and social reality in Denmark during the Holocaust, including the famous rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population with the help of scores of non-Jewish Danes. Ambassador Gettermann shed new light on history, saying there are revisionist historians who claim some of the rescuers were driven not only by humanitarian principles, but also by financial interests.

Still, the Danish attitude towards its Jews during the Nazi occupation was remarkable and unique. ”People tend to think of Scandinavian countries as one unit”, said Professor Poser, ”when in fact there were great differences in the way Jews were treated during the Holocaust. While about a third of Norway’s Jews were killed, a higher percentage than most Western European countries, almost the entire population of Danish Jews was not only spared but actively saved by Danes.”

”It is amazing is that more than 60 years after the Holocaust”, we learn new stories of heroism and rescue, such as the story of Consul Schroeder”, said Abigail Tenembaum, Executive Director of the IRWF.

November 9th and 10th marks the anniversary of Pogromnacht, not Kristallnacht.

On this anniversary we call on the International community to cease using the Nazi’s terminology for such a grave event. Kristallnacht – broken glass, is used to make little of what befell the Jews of Germany and Austria on these days. We must recognize that there were a lot more broken than glass.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Jewish homes and shops were ransacked and synagogues destroyed. Jews were forced to pay for the damages inflicted upon them. Many were tortured in the streets and as many as 30,000 were sent to concentration camps and never to return.

Let us commemorate the 9th and 10th of November and honor those who suffered by ceasing to use the Nazi term for the event. Let’s begin to call it what it really was – Pogromnacht – a notoriously grave pogrom against the Jewish people of Germany and Austria.

Pastor Annemarie Werner
Berlin

Oscar Vicente
Buenos Aires

Baruch Tenembaum
New York

Why should the Holocaust continue to be the subject of further studies?

According to the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, the word holocaust means ”a huge slaughter of human beings”. Another entry reads: ”Among the Israelites, especially, it implied that the victims were burnt up”.

Etymologically, the word holocaust derives from the Latin holocaustum, and from the Greek holokaustos, which literally means ”completely burnt up by fire”. Nowadays, it is almost exclusively associated with large-scale catastrophes and massacres, more precisely with genocide. That is, the genocide of the Jewish people carried out by the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War.

The Holocaust was premeditated, efficient, widespread and, above all, one of the most cruel killings known so far in History. Its victims were mainly Jews, but also other groups were annihilated by the genocidal fury: gypsies, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, crippled persons, political activists, union workers, common lawbreakers and also Christians.

The number of deaths brought about by the Nazis worldwide reaches unimaginable proportions, to the extent that recent researches show that the overall figures would be even higher than what has so far been known: around 26 million victims.

The cases of torture, mistreatment and slayings that became public knowledge thanks to eyewitnesses, file records and survivors, serve as tokens of human savagery, barbarism and decadence.

For some (or many) of the readers these data might be of perhaps little interest or non-significant, due to the time elapsed and the never-ending reference to these horrendous facts by thinkers and theoreticians of the second half of the century.

However, why would it be advisable that the Holocaust continues to be the subject of studies by sociologists, historians, communicators and the public in general?

On April 30th this year, the La Nación Buenos Aires daily published an article dealing with a recent study carried out by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen Institute of Germany, which points out that the lack of deep research into the meaning of this tragic historical process is already showing its consequences on modern societies.

The study referred to above, clearly shows that half the young population of Germany does not know what the Holocaust is.

Even though 80 per cent of the population has some knowledge on this subject, when persons under 24 years were surveyed, only 51.4 per cent could answer the question, despite the fact that ”the simple mention of the annihilation camp of Auschwitz, or the slaying of Jews” could have been accepted as correct answers.

This survey, whose results are being released to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, forces us to resume the study of these events and even analyze them with a magnifying glass.

Furthermore, this whole matter brings to our mind the regrettable behavior of Prince Harry of England, who attended a party disguised with a costume bearing the Nazi swastika. Even though the Prince apologized, this is an occurrence that should not be overlooked when talking about education and culture.

The approach suggested by these facts must necessarily invoke further studies to analyze and discuss them in depth with the aim of spreading information related to the scope of the phenomenon of the Holocaust. No matter how dark or incomprehensible it might seem, it should never cease to be the subject of deep and critical analysis to learn who we were, who we are and where are we going.

Otherwise, in a few years we shall be taken aback by a second Holocaust: the victims will then be our History and our Heritage. It will be a cultural Holocaust.

Victoria Bembibre is a volunteer of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Translation: Josefina Prytyka

We the survivors are now disappearing one by one. Soon history will speak of Auschwitz at best with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists, at worst with the malevolence of demagogues and falsifiers. This week the last of us, with a multitude of heads of state and other dignitaries, are gathering at that cursed site to remind the world that past can be prologue, that the mountains of human ashes dispersed there are a warning to humanity of what may still lie ahead.

The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda and the recent massacres of innocents in the United States, Spain, Israel, Indonesia and so many other countries have demonstrated our inability to learn from the blood-soaked past. Auschwitz, the symbol of absolute evil, is not only about that past, it is about the present and the future of our newly enflamed world, where a coupling of murderous ideologues and means of mass destruction can trigger new catastrophes.

When the ghetto liquidation in Bialystok, Poland, began, only three members of our family were still alive: my mother, my little sister and I, age 13. Father had already been executed by the Gestapo. Mother told me to put on long pants, hoping I would look more like a man, capable of slave labor. ”And you and Frieda?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She knew that their fate was sealed. As they were chased, with the other women, the children, the old and the sick, toward the waiting cattle cars, I could not take my eyes off them. Little Frieda held my mother with one hand, and with the other, her favorite doll. They looked at me too, before disappearing from my life forever.

Their train went directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, mine to the extermination camp of Majdanek. Months later, I also landed in Auschwitz, still hoping naively to find their trace. When the SS guards, with their dogs and whips, unsealed my cattle car, many of my comrades were already dead from hunger, thirst and lack of air. At the central ramp, surrounded by electrically charged barbed wire, we were ordered to strip naked and file past the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The ”angel of death” performed on us his ritual ”selection” — those who were to die immediately to the right, those destined to live a little longer and undergo other atrocious medical experiments, to the left.

In the background there was music. At the main gate, with its sinister slogan ”Work Brings Freedom,” sat, dressed in striped prison rags like mine, one of the most remarkable orchestras ever assembled. It was made up of virtuosos from Warsaw and Paris, Kiev and Amsterdam, Rome and Budapest. To accompany the selections, hangings and shootings while the gas chambers and crematoria belched smoke and fire, these gentle musicians were forced to play Bach, Schubert and Mozart, interspersed with marches to the glory of the Fuhrer.

In the summer of 1944, the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse, yet Berlin’s most urgent priority was to accelerate the ”final solution.” The death toll in the gas chambers on D-Day, as on any other day, far surpassed the enormous Allied losses suffered on the beaches of Normandy.

My labor commando was assigned to remove garbage from a ramp near the crematoria. From there I observed the peak of human extermination and heard the blood-curdling cries of innocents as they were herded into the gas chambers. Once the doors were locked, they had only three minutes to live, yet they found enough strength to dig their fingernails into the walls and scratch in the words ”Never Forget.”

Have we already forgotten?

I also witnessed an extraordinary act of heroism. The Sonderkommando — inmates coerced to dispose of bodies — attacked their SS guards, threw them into the furnaces, set fire to buildings and escaped. They were rapidly captured and executed, but their courage boosted our morale.

As the Russians advanced, those of us still able to work were evacuated deep into Germany. My misery continued at Dachau. During a final death march, while our column was being strafed by Allied planes that mistook us for Wehrmacht troops, I escaped with a few others. An armored battalion of GIs brought me life and freedom. I had just turned 16 — a skeletal ”subhuman” with shaved head and sunken eyes who had been trying so long to hold on to a flicker of hope. ”God bless America,” I shouted uncontrollably .

In the autumn of their lives, the survivors of Auschwitz feel a visceral need to transmit what we have endured, to warn younger generations that today’s intolerance, fanaticism and hatred can destroy their world as they once destroyed ours, that powerful alert systems must be built not only against the fury of nature — a tsunami or storm or eruption — but above all against the folly of man. Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is capable of the worst, as well as the best — of madness as of genius — and that the unthinkable remains possible.

In the wake of so many recent tragedies, a wave of compassion and solidarity for the victims, a fragile yearning for peace, democracy and liberty, seem to be spreading around the planet. It is far too early to evaluate their potential. Mankind, divided and confused, still hesitates, vacillates like a sleepwalker on the edge of an abyss. But the irrevocable has not yet happened; our chances are still intact. Pray that we learn how to seize them.

The writer is an international lawyer and the author of ”Of Blood and Hope.”

A route the responsibility of which the whole of Christianity must accept. Christian Conciliums and Synods originated many antijewish pogroms and created many of the regulations that were later found in Nazi Laws and decrees, the ones that led to the political anihilation, economic ruin and mass murder of millions of persons.

Thus, we see that the Synod of Elvira in 314 forbids the marriage between Christians and Jews under penalty of excommunion. Emperor Theodosius forbids these marriages under penalty of death. In 438 the Theodosian Codex forbids Jews the assumption of administrative appointments in the Roman Empire. The Fourth Lateran Concilium of 1225 forbids Jews all agricultural and cattlebreeding activities, prohibits their engagement in trades and forbids Jewish doctors to attend Christian patients. It also imposes a special tax duty for Jews, as well as separate dwellings and distinctive apparel (Jewish hat and yellow badge.)

Moreover, as Crusaders had received an anticipated pardon for the murders and robberies to be committed on their way towards the liberation of the Holy Land, they murdered and burned the Jewish communities that they encountered on their journey.

Martin Luther culminated his dispute with the Jews in 1534 with the recommendation of seizing their gold and silver, burning their synagogues and destroying the Talmud.

The Fifth Jesuit General Congregation prohibited the acceptance of Jews and Muslims and their descendants in the Order due to the fact that their ”bad blood” made them of inferior value and because they did not live up to the requirement of ”cleanliness of blood” which was indispensable in the Order. This measure was the first to introduce the concept of race in this matter, which up to that time had been limited to religious rejection. This 1593 rule was only annulled in …1946 (!)

The 19th century Enlightment and the secularization of states brought about equality of rights to Jews, but did not bring insight or theological comprehension to Christians.

On January 30, 1933, Alfred Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Immediately all Socialist and Communist structures were eliminated and the campaign of terror against Jews began. Jews were deprived of German citizenship as was Albert Einstein, in March 1933.

On March 29th, a boycott against Jewish University Professors was declared and on March 31st Julius Streicher (editor of the ”Stürmer”, an intellectually worthless hate pamphlet) declared the boycott of all Jewish shops and enterprises. He justified this a countermeasure taken in retaliation of the ”Jewish boycott in foreign countries” and declared the German Boycott to be ”a defensive action of the German People”. As a result of this campaign signs appeared on walls and members of the SA stood in front of Jewish enterprises with similar billboards that read: ”Germans defend yourselves, do not buy from the Jews”.

On April 7th, 1933, the ‘Bill for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service’ was passed. By it all Jewish civil servants were dismissed. Furthermore, the Prussian Evangelic General Synode accepted this law on September 4th and 5th, 1933, owing to the union between the German Church and the State. The Catholic Church, at least in Hungary, did not eliminate from its ranks clergy of Jewish ancestry until 1944.

The Pastors Emergency League and The Confessing Church were formed around Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As a minotiry the had to work illegally because of the laws and rules of the State.

On May 10th, 1933, books were burned in huge bonfires all over Germany. Professors and students set fire to books by Albert Enstein, Sigmund Freud. Bertrand Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig, among many others.

The Reich Chamber of Culture Law of September 22nd eliminated Jews from cultural life. Furthermore, the Defense Law of 21st May, 1935, excluded Jewish people from military service. Public baths, shops and coffee shops excluded Jews with signs that read: ”Jews not wanted”

In the Nazi Party Assembly of September 15th, 1935, the Antijewish Laws of Nuremberg were passed. According to these laws marriage between Jews and Christians were strictly forbidden in order to preserve racial purity.

Later on, these interreligious wedlocks were punished by the death penalty for ”the guilty parties”.

On April 1938 an ordinance was passed obliging Jewish property to be declared. These properties could not be sold. The celebration of contracts with Jews was forbidden and Jewish enterprises could be transferred only with a special permission given by the State.

As from July 1938 all Jews had to present themselves before the authorities with their identity cards that established that they were Jews. At the same time, it was ruled that Jewish children were required to bear specific names. In passports belonging to Jews the names Sarah or Israel had to be added as a second name. On September 27th, 1938, a professional prohibition against Jewish lawyers was passed. This disposition kept Jewish lawyers from practicing their profession as well as earning money through their legal knowledge.

On October 1938 the ”Aryanization” of Jewish property began.

On October 28th, 1938, some 170,000 Jews of Polish nationality were moved from Germany to Poland.

It is no wonder that due to these deprivations, limitations and thievery someone should commit a desperate initiative. Acts of despair have never been of utility but the desperate person does not analyze facts reasonably.

Herschel Grynszpan, whose relatives had lived in Germany with Polish nationality and were among the expelled, wanted the destiny of Jews under Fascist rule to be known and he wished to make an appeal to world conscience. When he learned about the deportation of his family, on November 7th, 1938, he went to the German Embassy in Paris and shot the Third Secretary who died two days later from his wounds.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the core of Fascist leaders were assembled to celebrate the aborted 1923 Hitler’s Putsch as a ”National Deed”. This group of Nazis immediately took advantage of an individual act of despair and proclaimed it ”an International Jewish anti-German plot”. A Pogrom was immediately ordered.

On the night of November 8th, 1938, hordes of SA and SS destroyed, burned and robbed homes of Jews all over Germany. They burned synagogues, as well as mistreated and humiliated Jews. A great part of the activists acted without uniforms to make world public opinion believe that it was a case of popular indignation.

In the course of twenty four hours, a hundred and ninety one synagogues were burned, ninety one persons were murdered and thirty thousand Jews were arrested and forcibly interned in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Many of them died due to the mistreatment inflicted by Nazi guards.

Many Jews that were not imprisoned committed suicide or died later on as a consequence of the mistreatment that they had received.

And the rules continued.

More professional prohibitions were added: the sealing and vigilance of shops and homes that had been violated was decreed in order to protect them from looting. This apparently legal order allowed the expropriation of the properties that later were given to the plunderers themselves, at special prices to keep the appearance of legality.

On November 12th, 1938, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, published an article where he declared that the German government had tried to avoid the furious reaction of the German people. According to Goebbels the German people had obeyed the government in a voluntary and disciplined manner, ending all violent actions in a matter of hours.

Also on November 12th a decree was issued by which Jewish property holders were obliged to eliminate at short notice all the consequences of ”the rebelion of the German people against the persecution of International Judaism”

The cost of the repair of the properties had to be taken by the proprietors and payments made by insurance companies were expropriated by the Nazi government.

As from November 14th Jewish children could no longer attend German schools. On November 15th, 1938, Jews were inflicted with a one thousand million Mark fine if they violated any of the antijewish rules or laws.

Some of the Jews who had been imprisoned were set free after having signed a affidavit that obliged them to keep total silence regarding what they had experienced in the concentration camps. Furthermore, they had to leave the country in twenty four hours. Many Jews could have left Nazi Germany if there had been more countries willing to receive them as refugees. This is the reason why, after the war, the German Federal Republic sanctioned an Asylum Law to afford protection to persecuted people of different parts of the world. This law, however, became an empty shell since many people who ask for asylum must sometimes endure up to eight months in subhuman conditions -without having committed any crime- just to avoid continuing being illegally in the country.

The Nazis gave the pogrom the name of ”Kristallnacht” or ”Night of Broken Glass” because of the great destruction that took place.

This was one of the last stages previous to the Conference of Wannsee and the terror that rampaged extermination camps.

Many Jews expressed their horror at the transformation of their neighbours in sort of vandals. Many of them remain with the doubt as to wether the friendly neighbour might not once again become a destructive beast.

Some non-Jewish testimonies gave small importance to these events and considered them just slight. Only a handful of people accepted them as a crime, against the opinion of the time.

When the SA burned the synagogue of Oranienburg Strasse, in Berlin, the chief of the 16th Police District ordered the fire to be put out referring to a law of Kaiser Wilhem’s that prescribed the protection of monuments. However, he was rebuked for his intention of ”suppressing of the healthy will of the People”, but only suffered a demotion.

Helmut Gollwitzer, parson of the Confessional Church, delivered a sermon in the community of Dahlem, a week after the Pogrom.

”… Maybe it would be more right if we were not singing, nor praying, nor speaking. We should only have to be preparing in silence for the day of the Last Judgment when punishment will be visible and tangible, crying out and asking how God allowed these things to take place. We are also responsible for this great fault, for not blushing with shame when simple men are transformed suddenly into savage beasts. We have all participated. One because of cowardice, another because of convenience, another to avoid problems; those who remained silent, those who closed their eyes, those who are slow of heart or who are condemnably precautious”.

”What must we do? You shall open your mouth for those who are dumb. God wishes to see acts, good acts, precisely from those who could escape with the help of God. Outside awaits your neighbour in misery, without protection, without honour; hungry, persecuted, displaced and in fear for his very existence. He hopes that the Christian Community will make a real repentance.”, he stated.

Many allusive details of this tragic episode are to be found in the Holocaust Commemorative Mural installed in our church on September 26th, 2004. It illustrates the happenings of those days showing fragments of books of prayers that were destroyed in the course of the pogrom. Among them, a Megillah Esther, of which several thousands were printed in Berlin, of which only three or four copies remain, all severely damaged.

We can see in these broken or burned pages an indestructible spirit and a word vanquishing words of hate and persecution. No burning of books, no pogrom and no destruction could ever put obstacles to the promises and the instructions of God.

An esteemed Jewish friend and teacher in our community who lived as a child the despair of the November Pogrom, the disarticulation of his life and the destruction of his world, expresses his religious faith after November 9th with measured words which ore full of significance.

”Believe me, in those days many prayers were said, night and day. Even in the gas chambers. We never thought that God would make a miracle, but we were always sure that this system had no base of sustentation and that it would disappear.”

Whoever approaches the Commemorative Mural at night, will see that a gleam of light reflects the altar cross on the Mural. It is only a physical phenomenon, but it’s symbolism tell us that Christian faith can only develop in full strength where there is awareness of its Jewish roots. Only where we can understand the Rabbi of Galilee and the spirit of His life we will perceive that light. Only where we have pity and we dare to turn around, only where we do not step on the broken lines, only there does the hope of Easter appears in the midst of darkness. And only if we look Jewish tradition face to face, we can develop Christian Faith.

For me this Mural is a consolation in a country where rightwing radical hordes march more audaciously ever day, where in the last elections they obtained ten percent of the votes, where foreigners are expelled and deported, where antisemitic remarks are already accepted again by society.

Pastor Annemarie Werner
Vaterunser Kirche. Berlin.

Translation: María Lía Macchi

Lost in the illusion that they themselves would be the true power behind the scenes, a conservative political machine, encouraged Hitler´s candidacy, persuading the indecisive President Paul von Hindenburg to nominate the ´´bohemian´´ colonel as Chancellor.

Already installed in power, Hitler surpassed them in quickness and capability. He not only suppressed any participation of importance by the conservatives, but by July l933 had also abolished unions, had eliminated the communists, social democrats, and Jews from any role in political life. At the same time., he began to deport his enemies to concentration camps. Following von Hindenburg’s death, Hitler obtained maximum power through a plebiscite, giving himself the positions of President and Chancellor of the Reich.

January 30 is also the beginning of one of the most tragic chapters in history that corresponds to the wholesale extermination of a people known as the Holocaust or Shoa.

The stories and accounts of the Holocaust are typically characterized by focusing, justifiably so, on the millions of slaughtered in cold blood by the Nazis. Nevertheless, it is also indispensable to look on the bright side of this incommensurable tragedy, if one can use this term, on the heroic gestures of thousands of rescuers, as well as on the luck and histories of lives of those who, thanks to the solidarity and courage of others, were able to elude certain death.

Among the principle stories which stand out are those of the diplomats Raoul Wallenberg (Sweden), Aristides de Sousa Mendes (Portugal), and Monsignor Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), among many others.

Of those in a secondary position, there is little that we know of them, inasmuch as their stories are used to being hidden so much behind the victims of genocide as of the heroic actions —and in some cases, even incredible ones— of the rescuers. But if there is something we really do know, it is that with the passing of time, the lives saved provoked the happy multiplication of their lineage. Some estimates indicate that the l200 people rescued by Oskar Schindler permitted more than 6000 persons to be alive in the mid l990’s.

The solidarity and courage of the rescuers exemplify the true meaning of the sanctity of life, as written not only in Judaism, but also in Christianity. In the reflection that beams light from the lives rescued, we undoubtedly see the torn reality of the opposite image — murder, the interruption of a future, and of all the possible futures that one has a right to hope for, the quashing of all potential, the rule of destruction for destruction’s sake.

The Wallenberg Foundation renders a tribute to all those who risked their own lives, and prevented many more from being taken by those who only relate to the language of death.

It is extolled the heroism that in the spring of the year 1943 made a group of young people face nazism with the precariousness of weapons, it is worth mentioning the will and courage of a few, weak, exhausted, poorly armed, who preferred death in combat to the darkened death awaiting them on the other side of the trains. I am glad for the dignity of that choice. It deserves all my recognition, all my praise. Finally, it is always about ways of dying. And those who upraise in Warsaw, somehow, took possession of the death that the camp wanted to take from them. Because not only life was lost in Auschwitz, but also death. But even that way, I ask myself about the fragility, about the negation that makes more tolerable the memory of the heroes, the exhalation of courage, heroism, integrity, other than the cold silence of fear and the nameless faces. I ask myself if around this memory it does not keep talking precisely, the tenacity of a strength that censors, to our regret, what is unbearable, what cannot be translated or fixed in the memory of Auschwitz.

It has been a long time. Nevertheless, when these days close to Pésaj come, the tradition that celebrates the Exodus and freedom, I can feel again the obligation, the need to remember and talk. I remember that ”the free world”, between 1939 and 1945, was indifferent, that ”ignored” the atrocities which that totalitarism imposed over our bodies. I experience the disappointment of those of us who believe that the defeat of nazism in war was going to open a period of freedom, of emancipation and equilibrium. I go through the years in which I could not speak, that time in which I could only listen to and be listened to by other survivors. Almost 40 years of embarrassment, without speaking; later I spoke, spoke a lot, I said my things, I wanted the modest and difficult favor to comprehend, but now, again, I see the bitter understanding of silence. A parable, a life. And in spite of everything, my memory is not empty: there are my parents, my brothers, my neighbors and friends. A memory made of humble and real faces. Soon there will not be witnesses alive; memory will be reduced to monuments, museums, it is going to lose the nature, the gaining experience. There are those faces and the names of my faces. ¿And the others? ¿What can I say, what can I remember of them?

Now I know that the between the uncomfortability of silence and the imposture of the hollow memory, ritual, when nothing calms my will to remember, I have prayers. The Kadish, the prayer that sons say for their dead parents, the prayer of orphans that in the Jewish tradition is repeated in the mourning. Yitgadal, veyitkadash shemé raba (Exalted and sanctified be the name of the great Sovereign), thus is how it starts, with the invocation of the secret name; to say it there must be at least ten men; in the Talmud it is read this beautiful aphorism nine rabbis cannot say the Kadish, but ten shoemakers can. To say the Kadish and have memory, this I have. I think that we are all sons of the indescribable drama of the Shoá, that today each Jew should say a prayer for the 5400 exterminated communities. I want to say my Kadish with the words of a friend of mine, Erika Blumgrund, Czech poetess who lives in Argentina since 1948:

”Itgadal veitkadash shemé raba…/I am praying for your souls/for you/those who have no graves/I say the Kadish./With ashes I cover everyday/my head/because it is forever/my grief/for your incinerated bodies/and horror lies ahead forever/in my heart./Millions of lives/preterit and darkened/but they are still awake in memories/the transfigured faces of panic/chase me in dreams/mocking laughs of those judges/deafen my ears/enveloped/by the blue steam of gas/cramped against each other the poor little things/ until their destinies are complete. ./A last death scream drowned/ and it is all gone./ Itgadal veitkadash shemé raba/ I say the Kadish for you/whose mortal remains rest nowhere.” *

*This poem was written by Erika Blumgrund, survivor of Terezin, and translated into German by Jorge Hacker.