Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel has proposed that a summit of the G8 be held at Auschwitz. He did so at the conference “Memory – Conscience – Responsibility”, held in recent days at the former Nazi concentration camp in Poland. According to Wiesel, who also hoped for a session of the UNO at Auschwitz, “the memories of the camp conceal the terrible truth of the precariousness of man”. During the same conference, the anthropologist Jonathan Webber, member of the European Association of Studies on the Holocaust, recalled that “Christians too suffered at Auschwitz”. But according to Israel Gutman, historian of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, it is wrong to speak “of the sufferings of Christians and the sufferings of Jews”: rather we should speak “of the sufferings of man”. We should transmit the memory of Auschwitz as a “place of hatred and violence”, especially to the detriment of the Jews, “so that the anti-semitism that persists in European culture may finally be eradicated”.
