This Saturday it’ll be Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let no-one be indifferent to this seminal date and let no-one argue that the current martyrdom of a people so tragically betrayed since the Balfour declaration minimises the importance of commemorating it.  

And yet…and yet, the decision of the current Israeli government not to accept a two-state solution but to take over the administration, not only of stricken Gaza but of the illegally occupied Left Bank does not bode well for any peaceable future. It seems, instead, close to the annihilation of a people’s right to have their own country, their own identity. Much like the Nazis’ final solution in fact.

Of course, it would be wonderful if both Jewish and Palestinian people could live together in harmony in one country. But with twenty five thousand Palestinians so many of whom were women and children killed and so many more injured with over 80% of Palestinian homes rendered uninhabitable it hardly seems a promising situation for any sort of reconciliation. It will be so difficult to forgive let alone forget!

Yet there is one important difference between the process of the Holocaust and the current Gaza-Israeli conflict and it is based on a most virulent ideology. The Nazis, under the Wannsee agreement on 1942, wanted the total obliteration – or vaporization to use an Orwellian term – of a race: an extinction as happened to the dinosaurs, the Tasmanian Thylacine and so many other life forms on Planet Earth. The first stage of this eradication was to be the de-personalization of the individual. No longer a name but now a number. No longer with one’s clothes on but now in a striped camp uniform. No longer with any dignity but an erasable ‘Untermensch’ – under-being. Without a home, without a family, with nothing….zero. The second stage was the extermination camp with perhaps a mitigation of slave labour for the lucky ones before their entry into the chambers.

There will still be many who contend that this is what some Israelis want for the Palestinians but I am quite sure, looking at recent demonstrations in that country, that they are not in a majority.

Certainly the current conflicts add disturbing shades to the Holocaust and may even feed its deniers. I was amazed to find that among this crazy lot there was Gerard Menuhin, the son of the great Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin!

These thoughts came to my mind when on a recent visit to our nearest ‘big city’ Lucca I chanced upon an exhibition in the Villa Bottini, a lovely peaceful spot of greenery in that gorgeous place.  

Titled ‘The Ghosts of Auschwitz’ it’s a photographic exhibition laid out in the cellars of the villa and presents an immersive journey, through objects, settings, music and background noises, taking the visitor directly to Auschwitz, in what was, during the Second World War, one of the main places dedicated to the systematic genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews and all categories of people deemed undesirable or inferior for political, racial or religious reasons: men, women, pregnant women, children, elderly people, people with disabilities, deprived of their humanity and sent to die in the gas chambers.

The darkness of the journey, the heaps of Zyklon-B rusted empty canisters containing the gas used for the extermination process, the harrowing photographs, the sudden shock of being removed from the town’s civilised streets with their shops, bars and chatting, smiling citizens into this hell-hole was utterly disturbing. It brought me back to the original impact the holocaust had on me when I entered Auschwitz and Birkenau II on a motorcycling trip to Poland earlier in this millennium. Then, I hadn’t quite realised how near this insanity was to the beautiful city of Cracow which I had principally come to see.

Photographer and writer Fiorenzo Sernacchioli made two trips to Auschwitz, in 2010 and 2011, and with Maurizio Della Nave created the ‘The Ghosts of Auschwitz’ exhibition so that, in his words, the Shoah does not become a mere line in the history books. I was able to discuss several themes with him. But one stood out in my mind. When the camp slaves, who had been allowed to live to carry out these tasks, entered the gas chambers after the gas had done its job they discovered that the victims had died forming a heap in the centre with the strongest men at the summit of this fleshly hill and trampled below them and covered with excrement emitted by many in life-threatening panic women and children – for of course, these were the weakest and the deadly gas was working its way up to the chamber’s ceiling. Carlo Levi, an inmate of Birkenau II, in his classic book on the subject states that the first human sentiment that disappears in extreme situations is the sense of solidarity: that we should help one another.  No decency when the survival of the fittest, the desperate wish to live until the last instance is at stake!

Tomorrow afternoon, at our local peace park in Fornoli, there will be an event commemorating the death of the youngest victim of the Holocaust in this part of the world: Liliana Urbach who died aged fifteen months after she was transported from Bagni di Lucca to Auschwitz. If you want to read my post on her it’s at: Suffer Little Children | From London to Longoio (and Lucca and Beyond) Part Two (wordpress.com)