bitter past
Andrew Feinstein
On January 22 1943 my mother and her parents received, at their home in Nazi- occupied Vienna, a letter from her 84- year-old grandfather.
It read in part: “My dearest children. I have received your letter and thank you for your best wishes on my journey, to which I am not at all looking forward. May God have mercy on the Jews and send us the long-hoped-for peace. I pray daily that our dear God will protect you all and give you peace. In my thoughts I embrace you and kiss you. May you all stay well. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Your father.”
This was the last contact Samuel Pick had with his family. My great grandfather’s journey to which he referred was undertaken squashed into a cattle truck, on a train bound for Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp, from where he never returned. In addition to her grandfather, 20 members of my mother’s immediate family died in Nazi death camps, mainly Auschwitz.
By the end of World War II the Nazis had murdered two out of every three European Jews – six million men, women and children whose only “crime” was to be born Jewish. In addition, up to 500E000 gypsies and at least 25E000 mentally or physically disabled people were murdered by the Nazis.
Tens of thousands of Slavs perished and thousands of political and religious dissidents and others deemed anti-social – including communists, socialists, trade unionists, and homosexuals – were persecuted for their beliefs and behaviour and many died as a result of maltreatment. About 350E000 individuals, deemed to be “genetically inferior”, were subject to forced sterilisation, including most of Germany’s 24E000-strong black community.
All this, and much more, was undertaken in the name of an ideology of racial purity, driven by irrational prejudice and deep-seated hatred of “the other”. This was an ideology to which millions of educated, sophisticated people subscribed. Civilised people who actively participated in, or with a few exceptions didn’t raise a finger against, mass murder on a scale the world never believed possible.
What is, perhaps, as tragic about the Holocaust for our generation is that the post-war period has been characterised by a number of other genocides, not of the same scale, but borne of similar notions of difference and racial, ethnic, religious or class superiority: I refer here to the Gulags of Stalinist Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia, the mass slaughters of Central Africa and the bloody ethnic cleansings of the former Yugoslavia.
In this month of Holocaust Remembrance, at a time when racism and xenophobia are again rearing their heads close to home and in faraway lands, let us ensure that the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning, which transcends race, religion or nationality.
This meaning is derived from the Holocaust’s demonstration of what the ultimate conclusion of racism, prejudice, anti-semitism and xenophobia can be, especially when those attitudes are legitimised by the state. For while discrimination does not always lead to genocide, it does invariably precede it.
The Holocaust further provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic and indifferent in the face of the oppression or victimisation of others.
The Holocaust has a special resonance in South Africa, given our history scarred so deeply by an ideology of racial superiority. There are clear parallels between the policies imposed on the Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 and those imposed on the majority of South Africans during the apartheid era.
Nazi policy of those years was to deprive Jews of civil and legal protection and rights, exclude them from almost all spheres of economic, political and cultural life and secure their physical removal from Germany. The Nuremberg laws, which defined Jews as inferior and prohibited Jewish and non-Jewish marriage or sexual relations, echo apartheid’s Population Registration Act, the Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act.
Racial segregation in schools, job reservation, prohibitions against the use of public facilities and amenities, separate beaches and benches, are all too familiar in our own not so distant history.
The similarity of ideology and mindset, and the common nature of deep psychological trauma, suggests that, in addressing our legacy, and residue of the evils of racism, prejudice, abuse of power, apathy and indifference we can draw on the universal lessons of the Holocaust encapsulated in the inalienable importance of tolerance, mutual understanding, justice and the celebration of diversity.
Let us, therefore, as elected representatives, encourage the study of and education about the historical and moral dimensions of the Holocaust and honour those who stood against it.
Let us commit ourselves to use our collective memory to plant the seeds of a better future in the soil of a bitter past. Let us reaffirm our common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice. Let us fight the evils of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, prejudice, anti-semitism and xenophobia that still scar so much of humanity.
As South Africans let us focus on what unites us, rather than what divides us. As Jew and Muslim, white and black, Christian and agnostic, rich and poor let us focus on our similarities rather than our differences in building a nation in which greed, selfishness and status are replaced by service, sacrifice and commitment.
Motivated by our common heritage of suffering and pain, let us build a nation, a continent and a world of which we can all be justly proud.
Andrew Feinstein is an African National Congress MP. This is an edited version of a speech made in the National Assembly on May 26 introducing a motion on Holocaust Remembrance. This was the first time the Holocaust had been debated in the South African Parliament. Feinstein’s motion was supported by all parties except the Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging