MKs at Auschwitz. 'Germans failed in destroying the spirit and strength of the Jewish people'
Photo: Israel Bardugo
Back to Auschwitz to prove we won
Op-ed: Is there a more symbolic way than the Knesset delegation to Auschwitz of showing the world that the Jews overpowered Hitler?
Every Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz
had one dream: To live one day after Hitler croaks and the German Reich is destroyed. Many dreamed that dream, only few got to realize it.
In the five and a half years in which the Germans controlled Poland, they annihilated six million Jews – one-third of the number of Jews in the entire word – and completely destroyed the Jewish culture which was concentrated at the time mainly in Eastern Europe.
Of some 1.3 million Jews who were sent to Auschwitz, less than 50,000 survived the greatest planned combination of horror and extermination in the history of the nations. The Germans turned the Polish town of Oswiecim in the Upper Silesia region, under the name Auschwitz, into the biggest cemetery in the world. A cemetery without a single grave.
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But those who planned the annihilation of the Jewish people failed to accomplish their mission. The new Jewish state, Israel, was established on the ruins of the European Jewry. A democratic, proud, strong, progressive, developed country, one of the most modern and successful countries in the universe. A country with impressive, even amazing, achievements, which turned it into one of the best in the family of nations in many fields. From high-tech to agriculture, from science and medicine to research and literature. In the past decades, eight people with an Israeli citizenship won the Nobel Prize, more than any other country apart from Britain and the United States. Rare achievements indeed.
Despite the incomprehensible price the Jewish people has been forced to pay for the unrestrained wild behavior of the Germans and their helpers, today I am certain that we won. We defeated Hitler and his tens of millions of fanatic and bloodthirsty supporters. We also defeated Auschwitz, because last week the Knesset, the parliament of the Jewish people which returned to its land, held festive ceremonies in that same damned camp.
Is there a more symbolic event to prove to everyone that we eventually overpowered Hitler and his friends, that the Jewish people is still alive?
The large Knesset delegation was accompanied by some 30 survivors of that complex of horror, including myself. Men and women, necessarily elderly, most of whom are naturally no longer in good health. But they all undertook this mission of traveling in very uncomfortable conditions to prove, through their presence in this damned place, that the Germans failed in destroying the spirit and strength of the Jewish people.
It was worth arriving at Auschwitz again if only to be with those elderly men and women, who are among the last survivors of the planned extermination complex, see their enthusiasm and pride, the sparkle in their eyes, when they arrive at the emotionally moving ceremonies with the people's elected representatives, as representatives of the Jewish people – and understanding that the dream has indeed been fulfilled.
