Lest someone forgets

Last Thursday the world commemorated the horrors of Auschwitz. Looking back on what happened then every decent man and woman asks in shame: How could the human race descend to such low levels of barbarity? The reasons were multiple and varied. One of them was the belief that one race is superior to another and this made decent men and women behave as brutes.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied southern Poland, was liberated by the invading Soviet Army on January 27,1945, after being used for the systematic slaughter of Jews as part of the Nazis' "final solution". Originally opened for Polish prisoners in 1940, it witnessed the shooting and gassing of more than a million Jews from two dozen countries, as well as 75,000 Poles, 20,000 Gypsies and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war. In all their camps the Nazis exterminated almost six million Jews, three million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies and homosexuals. The Pope and the German bishops are among those who reflected and spoke about the significance of this anniversary.

"Never again, in any part of the world, must others experience what was experienced" by the victims of the Holocaust, Pope John Paul II said.

Pope John Paul said it was essential to remember the Holocaust in order "to honour the dead, to acknowledge historical reality and, above all, to ensure that those terrible events will serve as a summons for the men and women of today to ever greater responsibility for our common history".

The Pope said people also should remember that "in the midst of that unspeakable concentration of evil" which was Auschwitz, "there were also heroic examples of commitment to good," of prisoners who demonstrated love for their fellow prisoners and even their "tormentors".

"Their attitude bore clear witness to a truth which is often expressed in the Bible: Even though man is capable of evil, and at times boundless evil, evil itself will never have the last word," the Pope said. "In the very abyss of suffering, love can triumph," he said. "The witness to this love shown in Auschwitz must never be forgotten," Pope John Paul said. "It must never cease to rouse consciences, to resolve conflicts, to inspire the building of peace"

Germany's Catholic bishops said that 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, their country still faces a "long road of cleansing and dialogue".

"Our nation has needed a long time to face responsibility for the monstrous crimes committed by Germans in Germany's name - even now, the mechanisms for erasing it from our memory are still at work," the bishops' conference said in a statement issued on Tuesday in Bonn.

"It is our nation's fault that Auschwitz was made possible, because few of us had the courage to resist. Our Church must also take co-responsibility, recognising the long tradition of anti-Judaism among Christians and within the Church," said the statement.

Such statements have to be repeated over and over again. There is a danger that people forget. This is not a hypothesis but reality. In a survey published on Wednesday by Poland's Public Opinion Research Center, only half the Poles said they were aware that most Auschwitz victims were Jewish, while a similar proportion of British citizens had never heard of the camp in a poll published by The Times in London on Tuesday.

The German bishops said that "At Auschwitz, our civilization was dreadfully confronted by the abyss of its own possibilities. The horror at the evil perpetrated here is still with us today."

Let us all remember so that this horror will never be repeated.