Sat. Feb 15th, 2025

We face the most destructive reminder generated by hatred and madness. It will never leave our hearts when its last beat stops: the Holocaust.

A PERPETUAL ANNIVERSARY

The liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp took place on January 27, 1945. It is impossible to forget the Nazi barbed wire exploiting the excruciating pain of the wounds. That morning, Anatoli Shapiro, a Ukrainian Jew in the Red Army, entered Auschwitz-Birkenau, amidst the unbearable smell and the living death dressed in rags, with their skeletons at the touch of the snow. “They were not human beings,” Shapiro would confess. The ashes floated in the wind.

On this 80th anniversary of the indescribable Holocaust, the desire to exterminate all Jews still lingers in minds confused by resentment. This is indicated by the magnetic compass of hate crimes. Now under another argument, but with Nazi principles: the imaginary Jewish responsibility for all the misfortunes that have occurred in the world.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was, on its scale, the criminal compendium of Nazi Germany that extended over thirteen years (1933-1945).

But there were different anniversaries nested within the anniversary.

The final solution of Wannsee (1942), the ghettos and the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen. the revolt of the prisoners of Auschwitz crematorium IV facing extermination on 7 October 1944. It happened in this Europe incapable of defending itself, in Asia, in the Muslim world with its ad hoc armies: the Bosnian Muslim militias or the Free Arab Legion created by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini.

The liberation of 1945 did not end with the return to a home that too many had lost. The anti-Semitic plague instigated the Polish pogroms of Kielce (1946), while Jewish refugees remained in old concentration camps: Dachau or Gusen. A sarcasm feeding, every day, the uneasiness of a return to the old ways.

Denazification became necessary. The idea of ​​genocide by the Jew Rafal Lemkin (1946) and Resolution 260 on the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (1948) contributed to this. The Potsdam Conference (1945) lost its energy (1951) and with it came the end of a legal dream. A non-doing, like the German mitläufer, the citizens silent in the face of Nazi horror.

Rebuilding a life without a home or family, with the scars of the winter ice, is impossible. Everything drives you to emigrate when the land of your country is only good for burying you. As in the Exodus (13:21), many followed the pillar of cloud and fire that pointed the way back home: the ancestral land of Eretz Israel.

THE DUTY OF MEMORY

The “Duty of Memory” is a bulwark against oblivion, the return of evil and brutality. A cry from Primo Levi about the condition of man. The need to fight barbarism, said Theodor Adorno.

It is surprising, today, how slowly ideas have consolidated, perhaps due to the opaque handling of a memory fueled by propaganda. A bubble of interests, which has burst, has left behind the invisibility of the genocide after the victims of April 19, 1943, in the Warsaw ghetto, who were brought to light in 1951.

It seems that the world has learned. The Holocaust was, in its internal essence, a project of forgetting. Including the process of mythification and its conversion into a metaphor and archetype, as Alejandro Baer reflects. But no.

Oblivion pursues, as in mythology, the return of happiness. It dissolves in wine the Homeric potion of nepenthe that buries the misfortunes of anti-Semitism, while hatred flows in the underworld of lies on the waters of the river Lethe, which grants oblivion to the souls of those killed by a twilight racism. “The manipulation of human behavior,” said the Jewess Elizabeth Loftus.

A mental slavery that dominates us.

It is about establishing a blinded society focused on the parts, without understanding the whole. The new blind sages of the Brahmaputra River, incapable of understanding the whole of the elephant. Saramago's blindness, a world of blind people surrendered to hydrocarbons. Pérez Alfonzo (OPEC) said it: "oil is the devil's excrement." We are thus faced with the suspicion of the old winds in a new world: the stirring of the black wings of anti-Semitism.

The “Duty of Memory” must stay away from the trough of historical memory. Gustavo Bueno said it: “The sub-concept that tries to create a common historical memory, to present certain memories as impartial and objective. What is designated as historical memory, if it is history, is not memory, and if it is memory, it is not history.”

THE LEGACY OF FORGETTING

“The traces of the past, and more specifically of the crimes of the past, threaten to be buried by political or pragmatic considerations,” Reyes Mate states taciturnly. A sea of ​​sticky air of anti-Semitism, which denies the Holocaust, constitutes the centre of propaganda, in the opinion of Yad Vashem. For this reason, Jewish communities feel insecurity and fear, instigated by those who seek to deconstruct the Jewish culture of the Jew Elias Canetti, in his “Auto da fe”.

Spain is no exception.

It is imperative to confront anti-Semitism, says the United Nations, while some of its conspicuous leaders turn criticism of Israel into an anti-Jewish trumpet. Their plans (2019,2021, 2022), like the Spanish ones (1941), comprise initiatives with little impact. International events reorganize the world and attack Roosevelt's four freedoms (1982), eroding them (Buchanan, XNUMX).

In Spain, their preachers persist in reformulating the rules, confronting the Irreducible Existence with the Programmable Man enunciated by Moreno-Márquez. They suggest a new democratic culture through a plan of action: a “Democratic Democracy.” An oxymoron typical of the Report for an Academy by the Jew Franz Kafka, published in the magazine der Jude (1917).

They resort to Joseph Goebbels' black propaganda. The intrusion of social media makes it impossible to ignore their messages when we are treated like ignorant children (Timsit, 2002). On October 7, 2023, Auschwitz was replicated in the kibbutzim and cities of Israel. The death marches (1945), in the kidnapped people lost in Gaza. It is the daily ritual of the two minutes of hatred dictated by Big Brother. Some Western governments are eager to lead Israel towards its destruction, as if the poisonous breeze of the times were blowing in other valleys. It is a fire that some are trying to put out with the water of the Jordan River.

We do not know why we remain blind to anti-Semitism. “I think we are not blind, I think we are blind, blind who see, blind who see but do not see,” said Saramago’s doctor.

A murderous obstinacy fenced over the rubble of freedom.

JJose Antonio Alvarez Risk
President of the Asturian Association of Friends of Israel

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