Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, has lately launched a YouTube page exclusively in Farsi. Through this channel the Museum stated that it would enlarge worldwide access to reliable information concerning the Holocaust. The Holocaust, also known as The Shoah “calamity” or in Yiddish Hurban “destruction” was the genocide of around six million European Jews during World War II. Such a devilish state-sponsored extermination was invented, developed and piloted by Nazi Germany.
When visiting the Auschwitz Camp on 28 May 2006, as a German Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, vigorously condemned the Holocaust and the Nazi Regime who carried it out. “It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people – a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.”
Many are the Jewish Holocaust survivors who cannot still believe what they and their deceased loved ones had actually gone through. Others would adopt a sarcastic stance vis-à-vis their faith, like that taken by Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his untiring work as a Nazi hunter who pursued Nazi war criminals, when he said: “God must have been on leave during the Holocaust”. In his touching and profound address at the Auschwitz Camp, Pope Benedict XVI harped on God’s silent presence amid the unprecedented mass crimes that were committed against Him and the human person he lovingly created.
How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes: “You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness... because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?
“Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:19, 22-26).
This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age – yesterday, today and tomorrow – suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!
The devastating experience the holocaust survivors had been subjected to has left its ineradicable “shadow of death” (Matt 4, 16) on them and their families. In the words of the Yad Vashem website: “(The survivors) turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss”.
In front of such appalling human crimes as the Holocaust, reconcilation must necessarily be implored. Pope Benedict XVI showed the way: “First of all from God, who alone can pen and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns”. The Farsi YouTube page can be visited at: www.youtube.com/user/yadvashemfarsi
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann