What Was It All For?

 On this day in 1945, the Red Army liberated the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz.

This was one of the many death camps constructed and run by the Nazis in what was called "the Final Solution", a term developed at the Wannsee conference on January 20th, 1942.

The shock and horror of this camp alone (in which Saints Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, among others, were murdered) moved the world to coin the ghastly word, genocide, and fulfill the promise of an independent state of Israel.

The world promised not to forget.

That is not what happened:

The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend.

Among those who traveled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on Jan. 27, 1945. She believes it will the be last gathering of survivors at Auschwitz, and she came from her home in New Jersey to add her voice to those warning about rising hatred and antisemitism.

“The world has become toxic,” she told The Associated Press a day before the observances in nearby Krakow. “I realize that we’re in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don’t stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction.”

Indeed.

 

How it's all going:

Canada’s government has removed a plaque inaugurating the country’s new Holocaust monument after critics blasted it for failing to mention Jewish people or antisemitism.

 

This Canada:

A panel survey commissioned by the Association of Canadian Studies and conducted by the polling firm Leger last spring found 18 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 24 years old agreed with the statement “I think the Holocaust was exaggerated.”

Among Canadians between 25 and 34 years old, 15 per cent agreed with that statement.

The survey queried 1,519 Canadians between May 17 and May 20, 2024. A margin of error cannot be assigned to panel surveys.

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Federal archivists in an Access To Information memo say they are concealing more than a million pages of records on Nazi collaborators in Canada to protect “individuals determined to be innocent” of actual war crimes. Cabinet had promised German researchers in 2009 that all Holocaust-related files would be released: “People want answers.”

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Questions are still flying — in Parliament, the media and across borders — after a man who fought for the Nazis during the Second World War was invited into the House of Commons and cheered as a hero during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's momentous visit last week. 

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, waved and nodded to the gallery as he received two standing ovations from Parliament — and Zelenskyy, who is Jewish — for defending his native Ukraine. It later emerged he'd done so as part of a notorious Nazi unit. 

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The idea to strike Hunka’s recognition from the official record of the House of Commons was proposed by Government House Leader Karina Gould on Monday.

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It's tempting to write off this collective lack of memory to the passage of time but the truth is it is a combination of things. The loss of a moral centre, the short attention spans of the incurious, cultural Marxism, and the replacement of human purpose with apathy have created a nouveau Eloi, a decidedly disinterested generation who cannot be bothered with concepts of right and wrong and even replaced those vacuums with instant gratification and the passing objects of the Two Minutes Hate until the next thing comes along.

When that thing comes along, that, too, will be forgotten.