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| EPILOGUE: The Aftermath |
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pg. 698 |
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Many Holocaust survivors have taken pains to tell their stories to the world. Here, former Resistance leader Abba Kovner gives vehement testimony at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
Photo: Gov't. Press Office, Lishkat Ha-ltonut / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Evidence for that judgment can be found at the magazine's Web site, for it is Wiesel himself who has authored the essay that accompanies the site's factual material about Hitler and the reissue of Time's Man of 1938 cover story. When the 20th century is remembered, Wiesel's essay states, Hitler's will be "among the first names that will surge to mind." Some say that Hitler's name should be blotted out forever. That sentiment is understandable, but when Wiesel decided to write about Hitler for Time's Person of the Century poll, another theme came to the fore. The world can ill-afford to forget Hitler because his infamy is not just that his regime launched, in Wiesel's words, "a war that remains the most atrocious, the most brutal and the deadliest in history." The essence of Hitler's infamy, inseparable from the war he waged, was the Holocaust. To remember the Holocaust means not to forget Hitler. Perhaps, then, Hitler should be the Person of the Century. The 20th century was, after all, the bloodiest in human history. No event did more to produce that outcome than the Holocaust. No person had more to do with the Holocaust than Hitler.
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In this scene from the 1993 film Schindler's List, a Nazi labor-camp commandant selects a Jewish woman prisoner to be his domestic servant. Ralph Fiennes played the commandant, who was based on sadistic Kraków camp leader Amon Goeth.
Photo: Fotos International/Archive Photos
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Today, we remember the Holocaust not simply as part of the past, but as an event with profound implications for the present and the future. We still have much to learn, but we do know this: The Holocaust was not inevitable. It emerged from deliberate decisions made by human beings. Those decisions were neither predestined or inevitable. Whether or not Hitler is Time magazine's Person of the 20th Century, we must insist that no one remotely like him shall have that distinction at the end of the 21st.
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The small, the helpless, the innocent: these were the victims of Adolf Hitler's Holocaust. His ardent followers exterminated millions. Those who survived, such as this Polish woman and her infant, lived with the horrors the rest of their lives.
Photo: Fred Ramage / Hulon Getty
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But our insistence--and the hope and determination that must accompany it--will not lessen the horror of the Holocaust. We can, however, nurture the memories of Holocaust survivors, and dedicate ourselves to remaining sensitive and well informed; politically aware and ethically sound. Such are the goals that The Holocaust Chronicle exists to serve.
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February 16, 1999: German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announces the $1.7 billion Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future fund. It is financed by 12 major German corporations to compensate people impressed by the Nazis into forced labor that benefited those companies during World War II. The corporations include Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, Krupp, and Audi.
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May 26, 1999: Germany agrees that Nazi-era slave laborers from Poland should get the same compensation as those from other countries. More than 400,000 Poles are seeking a total of more than $2 billion in compensation for their slave labor.
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Summer 1999: Five hundred newspapers worldwide publish full-page ads with clip-out forms that will enable Holocaust survivors to apply for their share of a $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss banks.
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Summer 1999: Memoirs of high-ranking SS functionary Adolf Eichmann are opened and widely publicized.
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| EPILOGUE: The Aftermath |
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pg. 698 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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