Putin's Shame - IV

Putin and Wiesenthal - commentary by Leopold Unger

Leopold Unger 31-01-2005, last update 31-01-2005 18:22

From Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw:

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/swiat/1,34181,2522106.html

96 years old, 60 years in action, 3,000 Nazi criminals on file, 1000 in prison. "The Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal doesn't go to the office any more, doesn't host any guests, doesn't even leave his house. Simon Wiesenthal has a right to be tired, and to say to theworld: "Leave me alone".

He has made an exception. After a long hesitation, he broke his silence. Over the grave called Auschwitz, which is one of the five camps built by Hitler camps (but historically the most important one) - a path he followed through the war.

He said that Auschwitz is a holy, symbolic place of genocide of the Jews, but also a symbol of the fate of humankind - the proof that neither the Holocaust nor anti-Semitism should became an exclusively Jewish "subject". What will be next? Nazism and communism, the old thinker asserts, have done so much damage that for humankind to grow up, to get rid off this poison, to develop an immunity to ideologies of this kind, several generations are needed.

While Wiesenthal mourned, Putin agreed with him. If Wiesenthal had listened to the Russian president's speech at Auschwitz, he would have found traces of this poison. Putin has done a real piece of jugglery here. A double one. As he spoke to the world from the biggest Jewish cemetery he never once used the words "Jew" and "Holocaust". And he achieved something that nobody before him has done it - nor previously, nor during the commemoration in Auschwitz - he brought to the mourning psalms his dirty politics, he made his deals. He compared Nazism to terrorism, he abused human speech, falsified the mood of the moment, he desecrated the mourning. Terrorism, like Nazism, is of course, and here Putin is right, "dangerous and perfidious". But against terrorism - and this what Putin "dangerously and perfidiously" passed over in silence, we had and have the military power of the state, a huge potential to counter-strike at it, and support, although not always the same one, of public opinion.

There are examples in the Americans chasing the Taliban out of Afghanistan, the Israelis liquidating the chief of Hamas, and his own Russians, wiping out terrorists and, in passing, also "ordinary" Chechens. The Nazis however, with the world's indifference, murdered, gassed, and burned defenceless Jews. One can understand Putin being upset by the Chechen cloud over Russia, but to use the world's mourning and cemetery commemoration for playing political games and justification for shameful suppression of a small nation is not appropriate for the leader of a large country. There is a war going on in Chechnya; in Auschwitz it was a Holocaust. Those are not the same things.

Wiesenthal didn’t hear Putin, but he came to the correct conclusion: humankind has learned nothing. Auschwitz is a memento. Freedom is not a gift from gods, it must be won anew, through subsequent generations, Only the unfalsified and non-misused memory of Auschwitz will be able to save our humankind from a repetition of this tragedy. Only this memory will not allow our consciences to be put to sleep: only it will see to it that no criminal will be able to sleep peacefully.

I don't know if Wiesenthal would like to say something more to the world, if he would like to leave to the world some moral testament. But what Simon Wiesenthal said, on the day of commemoration in Auschwitz, in his tired voice, possibly in his last words, is enough of a testament. And when the flames illuminated the railroad of the Jewish ramp, Wiesenthal, in the front of all the freezing VIP's, put down these words, instead of a candle, at the foot of the monument in Auschwitz.

(translation by Marius, my editing)

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LEOPOLD UNGER, born in 1922 in Lvov (now in Ukraine). Survived the war in Romania. Till 1969 worked for the Polish newspaper Zycie Warszawy,was forced to emigrate when the anti-Semitic campaign was unleashed by the Polish communist party and government authorities against Jewish intellectuals in Poland in 1968, worked for the Belgian daily Le Soir. Was a regular collaborator to the Polish dissident publishing house Kultura in Paris and Radio Free Europe, regularly published his commentaries in the International Herald Tribune. Since 1990, a columnist for the main Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.