75TH COMMEMORATION
SEVENTY-FIVE years on, the sheer evil and depravity against mankind defies comprehension.
Generations may have passed, but we still share the appalling horror felt by Red Army troops as they walked into Auschwitz.
Dispassionate history books describe the site as a “concentration camp”. It would be more accurately portrayed as hell on earth: a grotesque symbol of the horrifying consequences of man’s atrocious barbarism to his fellow man.
In total, more than six million people – overwhelmingly Jews – were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers and crematorium ovens. Victims, by accident of birth, of Hitler’s depraved ideology of Aryan supremacy.
As the last frail survivors pass into history, it is imperative the world never forgets the Holocaust. Never forget how, even in our professedly civilised modern world, far removed from the slaughter of those death camps, disagreement can mutate terrifyingly quickly into hostility and dehumanisation.
That was the premise of Prince Charles’s powerful warning in a speech at a solemn event in Israel marking 75 years since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945.
Standing alongside world leaders, the heir to the throne said: “Hatred and intolerance still lurk in the human heart, still tell lies, adopt new disguises and still seek new victims.”
Seventy-five years on, he asked, is our strife-torn society in danger of losing sight of the lessons from the atrocity? “All too often,” he said, “words are used as badges of shame to mark others as enemies.”
Prince Charles’ wise remarks as a chastisement to those who, even today, cultivate the wickedness of anti-Semitism and other disgraceful bigotry.
Listen to Jewish Labour ex-minister Dame Margaret Hodge. In the Commons she has lamented how hard-Left cranks in her party hurl execrable Jew-baiting bile.
Dozens of her family were murdered by the Nazis. Yet, on social media, she’s regularly taunted with photographs of the Auschwitz dead, swastikas and SS guards. Are these depraved morons, hiding behind their keyboards, proud of their nauseating provocations?
The internet drowns with Holocaust denial and repulsive anti-Israel propaganda. It is beyond belief the tech giants allow this foul content – a residue of the Nazi atrocities.
MEANWHILE, if the BBC had set out with deliberate cause to offend the Jewish community, they could hardly have achieved it more effectively. One of its senior correspondents has sparked fury by linking the Holocaust to the Palestinian crisis on prime-time TV.
This is why it is so important that influential public dignitaries such as Prince Charles counter such detestable and hate-driven disinformation.
His visit to Yad Vashem, site of the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, was also deeply personal – his grandmother is honoured there for taking immense risks to shelter and save Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Greece.
Tomorrow, his wife Camilla will represent Britain at a World Holocaust Day ceremony at Auschwitz. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge will join sombre commemorations here.
All this helps ensure the evil exposed 75 years ago never slips from our memories. A Royal Family serving dutifully as the nation’s moral lodestar.
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