70th Anniversary Of Auschwitz

This month saw the 70th anniversary of the world's largest mass murder in history, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp exterminations of the 30's and 40's by the Nazis. About 300 people liberated from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp returned to the camp to retell their memories of the place where more than a million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. The survivors are now so old that soon there will be no more to remind us of the unspoken fact that humans always will have a potential for unspeakable cruelty.

Many of the 300 said they made the journey to Auschwitz in search of a little "closure" 70 years after they lost their homes, their communities and, in many cases, their loved ones. But they also remind us that there are present day behaviors in the mold of the Nazi's of  70 years ago. One may make a case that Isis and many of the other radical Muslim fanatics are the new Nazis today and that they must be stopped immediately. They do exhibit many of the same characteristics and methods of the earlier version that operated Auschwitz.  They show us that another Auschwitz-like genocide not only can happen again, but it is already happening, albeit in smaller numbers.

Too many of us today are not even aware of or do not understand what happened at Auschwitz and that the evil  of that sort continues in part because of that ignorance. Each decapitation of innocents we see and casually accept is a mini holocaust, but has now become almost ordinary to many of us.  The surviving 300 Jews who met again at Auschwitz are a plea to the world to prevent another genocide, whether against Jews or others. Sadly, I think we are too detached from that reality and distracted by the imaginary problems our technological gadgets give us.

It wouldn't surprise me to see another Holocaust happen, and it could even be directed again against those of the Jewish faith.  Evil is still with us but too many of us seem to carry too little that it exists.