The Holocaust was an act of evil against Jews — and all of humanity | Opinion

Arbeit Macht Frei.

So reads the sign, in German, over the entrance gate at the Auschwitz concentration camp (with its Birkenau component), characterized as the most notorious death camp in Europe. There, 7,000 prisoners, including 700 children, were finally released 75 years ago last week.

The irony, the cynical and colossal lie, is that the phrase is translates to “Work makes you free” or “Work is liberty.” The Nazis forced prisoners to make the sign, while not a single prisoner was released.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, located in southern Poland, had four large gas chambers where approximately 1.1 million people were murdered, 90 percent of them Jews. We were reminded of this atrocity a few days ago when the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces was commemorated.

The Holocaust resulted in the killing of more than 6 million Jews, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. If we think that this can never happen again, we have not been noticing the rise of anti-Semitism worldwide.

The Anti-Defamation League has been monitoring this threat and has released a poll stating that more than 1 billion people hold anti-Semitic views; 35 percent of respondents from 102 countries say that they have never heard of the Holocaust; and 41 percent perceive that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country.

In a recent event for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, I discussed with participants the rise in attacks on Jews, anti-Israel rhetoric, violent Islamist attacks, the hatred toward Jews on social media and the true threat that this poses for all of us, not just Jews.

We must never underestimate man’s limitless capacity for evil, not aimed just at Jews. Practices such as the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau are designed to combat two problems: first, ignorance; and second, misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

As the saying goes, “Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.” Ignorance of the facts of the Holocaust (and they are facts, despite Holocaust deniers) should be addressed through education.

But the second problem — misunderstanding and misinterpretation — is much more complex and nuanced. This problem starts with the mistaken belief that the Holocaust — involving the murder of millions of Jews — is fundamentally a Jewish issue and only a Jewish issue. It leads inevitably to the misinterpretation of “Never forget,” as meaning, “Jews should never forget.”

But this narrow focus misses the fundamental character of the Holocaust as being man’s inhumanity to man, not simply being man’s inhumanity to Jews. It makes it a “Jewish problem” or “Jewish question” and only a “Jewish problem” or only a “Jewish question”. This is strikingly and chillingly reminiscent of the characterization by the Nazi regime of their “Jewish problem” or “Jewish question.”

This solely “Jewish” focus misses the essential point that it can happen to any group or to anyone. Humanity can fuel hatred, greed, selfishness, quests for power, exploitation and externalization of blame. The problem is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warning that, “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man.” Jews may have been targets throughout history as the “straw people” for the venting of these human weaknesses but the banality of evil is not simply a Jewish problem.

History since World War II demonstrates the non-Jewish nature of mass group executions. Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia murdered approximately 2 million in a population of 5 million. Tens of thousands of Muslims in the Balkans were slaughtered by non-Muslim Serbs. In Rwanda, in just 100 days, Hutus killed almost 1 million Tutsis. These are just a few examples since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 demonstrating the fallacies and dangers of interpreting the mass genocidal killings in the Nazi death camps as merely a “Jewish problem.”

John Donne asserted that, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Even if we are not sufficiently humane to fully internalize this, we at least should selfishly recognize that Donne is also saying: Each man’s killing diminishes each of us, because any one of us may be the next person killed.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen spent almost 30 years in Congress representing South Florida. She writes a monthly column for the Miami Herald. Send her your comments at HeraldIleana@gmail.com.