LEST WE FORGET (Satis Shroff)

Lest We Forget: Nazi Times (Satis Shroff)

In one of the last big Auschwitz-processes a 93 year old Oscar Gröning was man enough to admit and say:' For me there's no doubt that I have made myself morally guilty.' He admitted that as soon as he came to Auschwitz in Polen, which the German Army had annexed, that the Jews were being gassed to death.

This signalizes that the new justice doesn't look away after years of ignoring and bamboozling processes. Of late, there have been increased cases of xenophobia in Germany. When we think of the debates that are taking place in Germany, and what we experience in this country is atrocious and saddening. It reminds me of Bertold Brecht's 'Fürcht und Elend in Dritten Reich.'

In those days too many people were actively part in their own small ways, and contributing to the whole. That was the reason why it functioned, and how the nazis were able to carry enormous genocide of destroying the Jews and other people whom they thought not worthy of life by confiscating their worldly possessions, and ultimately even the clothes on their backs with the excuse that they should take a shower in the concentration camps. The showers were rigged and what the Jewish and other people were confronted with was zyklon B, a dangerous nerve gas. That was the reality.

Today, when you ask elderly Germans, who were part of the nazi movement, waved flags with swastikas, and who greeted Hitler and Gestapo euphorically, they choose to be silent or pretend they can't remember. 'Verdrängung' is the German word for not-wanting-to-remember the past. When Germans want to remember the days of the holocaust or shoah, it is a always an elderly Jewish lady from New York or someone else who are shown around in the talk-shows of the TV stations, but seldom do Germans come to the TV studio and talk about what they did during the days of the Third Reich.

Perhaps it's the collective guilt that makes them refuse to talk freely about what has been bothering them and eating into them all these post-war years. Many have traumatic experiences and wake up sweating having had nightmares of the terrible days in Stalingrad when Stalin's organ, and infernal artillery would start shooting shells. I used to know one such German soldier. He was 18 and had learned a profession as a baker and could bake great cakes but had to join the army. He told me stories of his days in Stalingrad and of the lovely French women in captivity in France, and how helpful the French were. But he couldn't get rid of his war-nightmares. He died of cancer two years ago in Freiburg.

There's a wave in the middle of the German society in which prejudice, vengeance and xenophobia are still deeply anchored in the mind of many people. A metamorphosis towards the rightist line of thinking has taken place, as well as a coming-out of such people and identification with the good olde days of the Reich.

Are the Teutonic and other European people who elect rightists tired of democracy? This is evident in another discussion regarding refugees, asylum seekers in Germany initiated by the so-called pediga movement.

It is important for us to seek solutions to these problems within the German society, and to change this climate of suspicion, prejudice caused by ignorance and xenophobia.

Even the Pope said anti-semitism was wrong. The anti-Jewish currents in the European societies, the hatred and aggression in Europe make us all worry. He urged every Christian to ban and shun every form of anti-semitism. Pinchas Goldschmidt of the European Rabbiner Conference (CER) admonished that the Jews had become 'collateral victims of Old Europe and Islam. The Jews in Europe stand on the railway-tracks in which two trains are about to confront each other at high speed. The Jews don't know which train will collide with them and roll them over.' He went on further and said that the radical Muslim immigrants would attack synagogues, Jewish schools, museums, and kill elderly and young people. The second train was the reaction of old secularised Europe.

A grim perspective indeed, if the politics doesn't bring new and peaceful changes in Europe.