“ I am not an elderly deportee, although I formed part of those who ought to have, could have been deported”, said Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, interviewed by La Croix (24/01) just before the “Day of Memory” commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the internees in the Nazi concentration camps. “ The Shoah – said Lustiger concerns humanity as a whole since it represented a modern, technocratic and deliberate form of extermination of an entire people. It is a key symptom, unique of its kind, of what man is capable of doing when he loses the use of his reason and places himself at the service of madness and power“. “ Auschwitz concluded the cardinal reveals what we refuse to see in all human misery and tragedy, in all the massacres and wars: that man, beyond all difference, is for believers the image and representation of God”. The French Catholic daily La Croix (25/01) also carried an interview with Jacques Fredj, 42 years old, Jewish, who had just been appointed to head the new “Memorial de la Shoa” that President Chirac inaugurated the same morning in Paris. “ The Memorial declared Fredj must be able to respond to a threefold mission: memory, education and history. We do not privilege the accounts of eyewitnesses over those of historians, or vice versa; we try, instead, to achieve a synthesis, because that is one of the challenges for the future”. The debate on the Shoah was further developed in France following Chirac’s speech at the inauguration of the Parisian Memorial. In particular, Le Monde (26/01) recalled the words of the President with the appeal “ to all schoolteachers in France to make efforts to ensure that their own pupils understand and never forget what happened“. Chirac himself called the victims of the Nazi death camps as follows: “ France he said must always remember those whom Malraux called ‘our brothers in the order of the night'”. “ Witness for the witnesses” is the title of the first of the two editorials published in the daily Herald Tribune (27/01) to commemorate the anniversary of the Shoah. The author, Deborah E. Lipstad, professor at Emory University in Atlanta, underlines the attempts of revisionists to downplay, or even deny, the reality of the camps. “ Figures like Irving (one of the historians cited) she writes have turned Auschwitz into the focus of their attacks because it represents the prime symbol of the Holocaust. These denials may achieve their purpose more completely if there is no longer anyone who can say: ‘This is my story. This is what happened to me'”. That’s why Lipstad concludes “ the historians of the Holocaust, just like those of other genocides, such as those in Rwanda and in Sudan, have a particular responsibility to be not only meticulous and exact on the historical level, but also to be ‘witness of the witnesses'”. The Germans also reflect on the Shoah on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Commenting on the witness of the survivors, Thomas Schmid writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (27/1): “ Must we fear that once they die the holocaust will fall into oblivion? Will it sooner or later be historicized in such a way as to reduce it to just a bizarre episode of mass murder in an unimaginable prehistory? […] There is the attempt to transform the holocaust into a myth a negative one at the origin of the German Federal Republic, which succeeded the Third Reich, and even of Europe in general and the European Union in particular“. Schmid rejects the idea of a “ zero hour” and of the” habit of referring to the meaning of Europe almost exclusively in terms of flight from the holocaust“. We need to avoid this, he adds “ because otherwise we won’t liberate ourselves from Hitler: the author of the holocaust would become the calamitous founding father of a pure Europe an honour this criminal does not deserve“. The weekly Der Spiegel (24/1) publishes an interview with a survivor of Auschwitz, Anita Laser– Wallfisch, who observes about the German way of commemorating the holocaust: “ In Germany, there’s always something about the holocaust on TV. That may be excessive for the young. The most important thing is not to speak so much about it: what’s more important is to transfer the experiences of that time to our life today. I sense the danger of the holocaust being placed below a glass case, like the Napoleonic Wars or the Thirty Years War. When the memory of the atrocities and the cruelties of the past is not linked with the present, it has no meaning. And there are still so many terrible things in Germany and in the world“. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1358 N.ro relativo : 7 Data pubblicazione : 28/01/05
