National Post
Wed Jan 27 2010 Page: A14
Section: Editorial
Byline: Bernie M. Farber
‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI,” reads the sign to the entrance of Auschwitz: “Work sets you free.” It is alleged that when Auschwitz prisoners were forced to construct the sign, they inverted the “B” in ARBEIT as an indication of the evil within the camp. For the Jews whom the Nazis sent to the gas chambers immediately on arrival, this hollow hoax barely had time to register. For those murdered later, the lie may have lingered as a cruel reminder of the hell on earth they inhabited. The fortunate few who survived were liberated from the death camp by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945.
Last month, thieves stole the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign from the entrance to the camp. Through good police work, Polish authorities recovered the damaged icon of the Holocaust. But the brazen theft shocked the world and added a dismaying dimension to any retrospective on the meaning of Auschwitz 65 years later. What was the subtext to the recent crime: remove the most visible and infamous symbol of the Nazi genocide of the Jews and pretend it never happened?
After the Holocaust, the nations that had largely stood by in silence and indifference attempted to prevent future atrocities. Within five years, the world created the United Nations and adopted both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide. These actions seemed to underpin the post-war watchwords “never again” — a signal that in both practice and law the international community would never again allow a such heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In the six-plus decades since, however, “never again” has become “again and again.”
The book on 20th-century genocide that should have closed with the Holocaust has subsequent chapters titled “Cambodia,” “Rwanda” and “Kosovo.” And the hopeful promise of lessons learned entering a new millennium has given way to a new, ugly chapter still being written called “Darfur” — one that may, at last, be concluding.
In each case, the international community failed to recognize the early warning signs and then compounded its negligence with inaction. This may be happening yet again, before our very eyes, in Iran, where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad overtly denies the Holocaust of the Jews while at the same time seeks nuclear weapons to finish the job.
The clearest of the malevolent omens is the language of dehumanization that precedes virtually every instance of modern genocide or ethnic cleansing. From Jewish untermenschen to Tutsi “cockroaches,” the first goal of every genocidal regime is to strip the intended victim population of its humanity.
If unopposed, this campaign emboldens tyrants like the Nazis to up the ante and impose increasingly severe and restrictive laws and measures that bear increasingly lethal consequences for their victims. Evil words lead to evil deeds and we ignore early intervention at our peril.
The Holocaust required humankind to expand our vocabulary in an attempt to put into words the indescribable. We have a solemn duty to protect these words from deliberate abuse. The lexicon of genocidal evil and horror is diminished with every trivialization — think, for example, of descriptions of some woman’s rights advocates as “femi-Nazis.” The subtle diminutions of language are not as troubling as the full-bore, direct assault on memory of the Holocaust denier, but they are utterly disrespectful to the memory of the six million Jews and others who were slaughtered by the real Nazis. Both, moreover, whitewash historical experience and weaken the collective will to take on the next regime of genocidaires.
So as we strive to make contemporary meaning of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must all commit to stopping attempts to dehumanize human beings. We must understand the terrible chain of events that will follow should we fall short. And we must shun inappropriate comparisons and terminology that minimizes the worst event in the history of the world. And if we fail these tests, we must resist the inevitable subsequent efforts of evil regimes to begin a new campaign of genocide, ethnic cleansing and hell on Earth.
This certainly will take work, but it is the kind of work that, in the end, just might set us free.
- Bernie M. Farber is CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress and the son of a Holocaust survivor.
