Judenrein. It was a normal flight home from Canberra. Passengers fidgeted with seatbelts, put on headphones in a pre-emptive strike against chatty strangers and jostled for armrest territory in cattle class. There was nothing remarkable as cabin crew helped with overhead lockers and a proud, elderly man declined assistance from a female attendant. As he lifted the baggage overhead, wobbling slightly from the strain, his coat sleeve slipped away. There, on his arm, was a row of numbers; the indelible tattoo of a Holocaust survivor.
The Holocaust is a curiosity shop, a fun event for collectors of the weird and wacky. At a recent fair held in Melbourne, replica canisters of Zyklon B were sold. What a great way to prop up your makeshift bar in the pool room!
We forget the Holocaust at our collective peril.
The final solution came into effect with the first mass gassings of Jews. The word “final” was defined by Nazi Reinhard Heydrich as the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race. In Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson traced the operative date for the final solution to April 1942. During the preceding year, Nazi command had experimented with various killing methods. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Camp A at Auschwitz-Birkenau, had tried shooting but it was too messy. Another tried and failed method was the use of carbon monoxide gas. In her book Eichmann in Jeru-salem, political theorist Hannah Arendt recounted Adolf Eichmann’s testimony on preparations for CO chambers at the death camp Treblinka. In Poland, the gas was in mobile execution vans to kill en masse. Eichmann recalled the horrific screaming of Jews huddled in moving vans as the gas killed them slowly.
Read the article by Jennifer Oriel in The Australian (subscription required).