Holocaust started small, we must be wary of the seeds of hate
■ Like many other viewers, I was greatly moved by the RTÉ documentary ‘Condemned to Remember’, in which Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental recalled his first-hand experience of an era that will forever cast a dark shadow over humanity.
What an essential testimony, given current efforts by organisations, individuals and some national governments to deny or “revise” the Holocaust, motivated either by a desire to suppress the truth for political reasons or to facilitate a revival of the very ideologies or forces that paved the way for Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
I was impressed by Tomi’s refusal to give in to hatred, his wish being to remind us this really happened and to help ensure it won’t happen again.
Unfortunately, as he pointed out with great sadness in the programme, the lessons of the Holocaust still haven’t been learned by sizeable numbers of people.
In addition to the examples he cited, one thinks of the Rwanda genocide and the present day attempted ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas in Myanmar.
But we also need to focus on our own lives and where we live. The event, or series of events known as the Holocaust, began with suspicion borne of ignorance, petty hatreds and racial intolerance.
We see these negative forces at work today all around us. While visiting Dublin a few months ago, I saw and heard, across a wide street teeming with shoppers, a pair of youths shouting foul names at a woman of a minority ethnic culture. She didn’t turn around but she seemed to have heard them.
The same could have happened in any town or village in Ireland. None of us is perfect.
The seeds of racism and xenophobia are all around us.
We have to make sure they don’t take root because, as Tomi reminds us: “Anyone can be a victim and anyone can be a perpetrator.”
John Fitzgerald