Maof

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I think the closing of Auschwitz was at least as monumental an event as the Exodus. Of course, everyone, except me, calls it liberation rather than closing. To me however, every reference to liberty in connection with Auschwitz is too reminiscent of the famous inscription over its gates: Arbacht Macht Frei. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million Jews — many times more than followed Moses out of Egypt — had been liberated there of the burden of their lives before the Soviet army arrived at the camp's gates. Yes, I know, other people suffered and died there along with Jews, and my heart aches for them too; but they were collateral damage, accidental victims of the killing machine built with the specific purpose of exterminating my people. A machine that could have never been built had not most Christians around the world been, at least, silently complicit in its construction.

Yes, I know about Raoul Wallenberg and other Righteous Gentiles who risked and often lost their lives trying to save Jews. Each of those heroes has a tree planted in his name at Yad Vashem. Unfortunately, the resulting forest will be insufficient to provide an operational base or even a hiding place for the Jewish partisan movement when Arabs occupy the rest of Israel. Obviously, were there enough Gentiles believing that merely being Jewish is not a good enough reason to be murdered, Israel would be in no danger of Arab occupation.

The six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust constituted less than one tenth of all World War II casualties. But mine is a tiny nation. The enormity of evil unleashed against us is incomprehensible. The Holocaust took away between one third and one half of the entire Jewish population of the world. I don't know if today, six decades later, it has reached its pre-World War II numbers. What I do know, however, is that Jewish communities that had existed in Europe for many centuries before being destroyed by the Holocaust will never come back. They were alive with a unique blend of ancient Jewish and local culture. They financed kingdoms that let them stay on their land. They gave the world uncountable doctors, philosophers, poets, and musicians. They produced Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein. They are as dead as every Jew killed at Auschwitz. Their few survivors were scattered around the world. They left behind a vacuum reeking of burned Torah scrolls and burned human flesh. Today, this vacuum is being filled by Muslim invaders irreversibly turning the continent into a province of the Caliphate, ruthlessly pushing it back to the darkest of the Dark Ages. Such is the price Europe is paying for the betrayal of its Jews. But is it justice? No, it's suicide; it is the continuation of the Holocaust.

Today, the world is poised to uproot and scatter Jewish communities in Israel and to replace their population with Arab terrorists. Calling those communities settlements does not change the meaning of what's happening. The Holocaust is raging on. Or is this already the next one?

If we keep reminding ourselves that we, every single one of us, personally came out of Egypt three thousand years ago, then there are six million reasons for us to feel that the Holocaust was committed against every one of us personally. If you are a Jew born after World War II, you were born only because Germans and their enthusiastic helpers failed to kill your parents or grandparents. Not that they didn't try.

Whenever and wherever you were born, every Jew who left a German death camp through the chimney of its crematorium took a part of your soul with him. You might not feel the loss because you were born with it, but trust me, the loss is there. It's yours forever, and it's very personal. Considering the entire history of the Jews, it's not the only scar on your soul. Judging by the direction the world is going, it won't be the last one either. Every time a Jew in Israel gets blown up by an Arab murderer, a part of your soul dies along with that Jew even before you hear of it in the news.

Everyone's soul is different. Some people's souls are big and strong; every loss hardens them against the enemy. Some people's souls are small and weak, and they end up like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Unfortunately, my theory does not explain how these soulless cripples become so powerful. Can it be that the Jews, just like every other nation on earth, have the government they deserve?

What can we do? Cause a tsunami? Nah, that's silly. Let's do a Jewish thing instead. Let us observe Yom Auschwitz every year, in every family. Even though I am an ignorant person and don't know what date January 27, 1945 was on the Jewish calendar, I feel we should leave January 27 to the Gentiles to contemplate their betrayal of us if they choose to do so; or to go about their business as usual if they don't. We will celebrate Yom Auschwitz according to our own calendar, our own count of days and sorrows.

I can imagine a conversation at the office on the eve of Yom Auschwitz.

“Why are you taking a day off tomorrow?” the Gentile manager asks his Jewish employee.

“Tomorrow is a Jewish holiday,” the employee explains.

“Which one is that?” the boss wants to know.

“Yom Auschwitz,” the Jew says.

“Yom what? Oh, never mind. Have a merry one!”

“Thanks, boss!”

The next day, the entire family will gather around the dinner table wearing striped clothes. Truly observant people will have special garments modeled after prisoners' uniforms. For the rest of us, anything with stripes will do, just like a pair of green socks would suffice on St. Patrick's Day. It would be appropriate to borrow a part of the Yom Kippur ritual and abstain from eating for the preceding 24 hours, to have the pangs of hunger remind the celebrants of their suffering at the hands of the enemy.

At each table, two places will be set aside for two of those who did not survive the Holocaust. Why two? Because there are less that six million Jewish families in the world. If we only set aside one, some of the victims' souls will feel forgotten, and we don't want that to happen. Fortunately, there are more than 3 million Jewish families, so there will be more than 6 million chairs set aside. That's good. The extra chairs will be there for those homosexuals, and Gypsies, and Ukrainians, and Poles, and everybody else who burned in the same ovens with us. Often without realizing it, they weren't that different from us when they were alive; they certainly aren't different enough from us now to be excluded from these festivities.

Similar to the way it is done at a Passover Seder, questions will be asked by children and answered by wise elders. Thus, a child who, against all evidence, believes in the inherent goodness of all human beings, might ask, “What despicable crimes have we committed to deserve such a terrible fate?”

A child who recently started kindergarten, might ask, “Daddy, why did you kill Jesus?”

An obnoxious child might ask, “What did we do to Arabs in Jenin that was similar to what Germans did to us at Auschwitz?”

And an innocent child might ask, “What does it mean — 'Never again?'”

Responding to the child who believes in human goodness, the elders will explain that Jews have been persecuted throughout history not for crimes they might have committed but simply for being Jews. They should make it clear to the children present that every single accusation that has ever been leveled against Jews as a community was a libel; that in all cases, without exception, the accusers knew their accusations to be false, but neither such knowledge nor the innocence of the Jews has ever prevented a pogrom.

To the child who just began attending kindergarten, the elders will respond that neither her father, nor any other Jew killed Jesus. Killing Jesus was only one of the Jewish crimes invented by anti-Semites. The elders will emphasize that no matter how many centuries have passed since the alleged crucifixion, every Jew who has ever lived has been held personally responsible for that particular crime, and many Jews have paid for this fabrication with their lives.

The elders will refuse to insult the memory of Holocaust victims by explaining to the obnoxious child the sheer idiocy of his question.

And to the innocent child they will say that the words “Never again!” were originally used to express the determination of the Jews to never again allow themselves to be treated the way Germans treated them during the Holocaust; but, since Israel began its gradual surrender to its weak and infinitely evil enemy, those words have become completely meaningless. As a result, we are as defenseless today as we were on the eve of Kristallnacht.

At the conclusion of the feast, the eldest person present will ask everyone the most important question:

“Those who were first to accuse Jews of killing Jesus, knew they were lying. Those who accused us of killing Gentile children and using their blood to make matzos, knew that was not true. The authors of the Protocols knew their creation to be libelous from its very first word to the very last one. The authors of the Iranian TV series about Jews stealing Arab children's organs know Jews don't do that. Those who compare Jenin to Auschwitz, know the difference between the two. Why do they do it? Why do they keep regurgitating old lies against us and inventing new ones?”

A child would answer,

“Because they hate us.”

“But what do they really hate us for if we are not guilty of anything they accuse us of? And why do we never hate our haters back?”

For a few moments, the room will be very quiet. So quiet, that if you hold your breath, you will be almost able to hear Gentile victims of the Holocaust weeping.

Happy Yom Auschwitz, everybody!

Russian version