Cec: "the tracks that lead to Auschwitz…"” “

In a world of violence and poverty, disease and suffering for millions of individuals we should ask ourselves in what direction we are heading, given that the tracks that lead to the concentration camp of Auschwitz are still there”, writes the general secretary of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) in an article published in the weekly “Baptist Time” on 27 January, to mark the “Day of Memory”. “I was at Auschwitz in March 2004 – says Clements –; in spite of all I had read and studied it was difficult to believe once I was there, on those tracks, the most infamous in history, that led through the gates of the camp”. “The railway for Auschwitz began from widespread anti-Semitism. They joined the roads of nationalism, of racial superiority, linking it with the belief that differences of colour, culture and religion were inimical to a pure race. The engine of the train – continues the CEC secretary – was fuelled by the conviction that some peoples had to be exploited to obtain economic advantages. To the point of the ‘final solution'”. Auschwitz, says Clements in his article, “was the most horrendous crime in its combination of planned brutality and programmed inhumanity. What happened in that camp did not simply happen, but made to happen and allowed to happen”. “Auschwitz – he concludes – is the result of the moral evasion and fear that makes people silent and passive, and today it obliges us to ask ourselves in what direction we are heading, given that the tracks of Auschwitz are still there”. The Conference of the European Churches represents some 125 churches (Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, Old Catholic…) and 40 church organization scattered all over Europe.