Against great evil - Holocaust 50th anniversary ceremony

Fiftieth anniversaries acquire a particular poignancy and power because they are the last chance for those actually involved in an event to define its meaning. By the 75th anniversary almost all of the actors will be gone, and the memories of those remaining will be blurred. That is why the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz became such a focus of attention, and the occasion of an unseemly scramble between competing victims of the Third Reich, notably between Jews and Poles. Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, helped to mediate the conflict, because he "thought it was wrong to have these tensions risking the sobriety and nobility of the event."

In the end there were official ceremonies sponsored by the Polish government and a service at Auschwitz-Birkenau put together at the last minute by Jewish organizers who complained that the government was slighting the Jewish significance of the catastrophe. Most historians agree that more than a million people were killed at the camp, and 90 per cent were Jews. For Poles, however, the Auschwitz ceremonies represented the entirety of the Nazi occupation in which 6 million Poles were massacred, starved, or sent to death camps, with another 2.5 million deported to forced labor in Germany. A little-remarked irony in this dispute was that the Poles, commonly accused of harboring a deep-seated anti-Semitism, were including Jews in the count of Polish victims. The insistence that Jewish victims be put in a category separate from Polish victims, some Poles complained, is precisely the kind of thing that one might expect from anti-Semites.

It is neither surprising nor new that the passions engaged by the horror of Nazism lead to painful confusions and conflicts. The Holocaust is perhaps our culture's only icon of unquestioned evil. Like all icons, it is subject to interpretation and susceptible to abuse. Define the Holocaust too broadly, and the singular evil of anti-Semitism is obscured; define it too narrowly, and it is reduced to a tribal lamentation.

Some say too much has been made of the Holocaust. Stalin and Mao, they point out, committed mass murder on a scale larger than Hitler's; Pol Pot made more of what he had to work with. But we must not fall into the trap of relativizing evil by pitting horror against horror. Each crime against humanity deserves undivided attention. All of us have an ultimate stake in the cry, "Never again!" The Nazis declared that some people possessed lives unworthy of life (lebensunwertes Leben) and acted out the logic of that doctrine. Today that odious doctrine is promulgated again - against the unborn, the weak and aged, the radically handicapped.

Remembering Auschwitz with "sobriety and nobility" does not guarantee that crimes against humanity will not happen again, but obscuring the remembrance by acrimonious rivalry in ranking the victims can only debase a symbolic safeguard against the great evils of which we are all capable and by which we are all threatened.