Sixty-five Years Later

They say that remembering will give people some insight into the unjust they did years ago the taking of lives on mass at concentration camps, the loss of identity and smuggling of people across boundaries in crates and under barbed wires. This is to account of the those that survived thanks to some non-Jews who risked their lives and their professions in order to get Jews to safety because the wiping out of them was not the right thing to do. That is what Prof Moller from Denmark said today having talked about his country’s contribution for the survival of the Jewish race.

Moller was part of the resistance then. He remembers the few hours it took for Germans to conveniently occupy Denmark in 1940. Then Jews were somewhat guaranteed that they could keep their positions but when an SS soldier came in to supervisor the Danish population things began to change. Hundreds were deported to a concentration camp, mostly from an old people’s home the government did not know harbored Jews, he said. Otherwise they would have been warned. One would like to believe the man that the home did not have a registry of names that would have been supplied  government officials with information on the ethnicity of its inhabitants, or was their no knowledge entirely?

Jews were smuggled out of Denmark in the forties and onto Sweden, a neutral wartime country. One can remember that country for its Schindler, the man who inspired Spielberg for his film on the saving of Jews by bartering with the Germans to acquire Jewish labour and giving Jews passports to freedom. Thousands would be ferried across to Sweden in the night, an operation the old professor admittedly said took twenty thousand men. He was referring to operations at some port in Denmark and the receiving of Jews at a corresponding port of call in Sweden followed by helping to keep Jews out of danger.

Moller, today a McGill professor and then part of the Danish resistance, was one of several speakers reminding us of the liberation from Auschwitz and the other camps.His story of the smuggling of Jews away from the clutches of the Nazis to a war neutral Sweden, along with references to Belgian priests and other non Jewish citizens from occupied Europe who hid Jewish children and adults is testimony that smaller nations could contribute to hugh humanitarian efforts. Even a Japanese diplomat risked his career to smuggle Jews out out of German occupied Europe!

Some never got involved in the workings of the camp. One referred to having had to dig trenches for the Germans though to defend Budapest from an impending Russian tank advance, and fortunately his fate was better than others. Another speaker an older lady said that she compromised her identity when in the Warsaw ghetto, she was taken in by a Mother Superior and her name was changed.A third described his sojourn in a cave with his brother for a two year period, while being out of German site. There was only room, to sit and to sleep for the both of them. This was in Slovakia. In the meantime he and his family were dispolaced from to Brno an then to Bratislava when all the while under fear of being deported to the das chambers and his father lost his business. One survivor admited that he was lucky his group was spared Aushwitz, where extermination took place because the quality of their work was good! Thank goodness the German valued his hard labor but of course that meant someone else wuld be sent to the camp marked with the slogan translating to “work makes you free!”

These are some of the stories recounted to mark the 65 years since the end of the concentration camps which were to serve Hitler’s scheme for removal of unwanted ethnic groups.Today there are events still occurring in the Darfour that we are still talking about while innocent tribal people are getting killed and there are other hot spots where similar killings have been done in Rwanda and Cambodia. Genocides are still with us and we have to act so that these things do not occur again.