Saturday, January 28, 2012

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Yesterday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, a date chosen because it marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. In Berlin the day began with a televised special assembly of the German parliament, including prime-minsiter and president, listening to an adress by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warshaw ghetto. Turkey became the first ever muslim country to mark this day by broadcasting the nine hour documentary Shoah on state television.

In Teheran, on the other hand,  a number of Holocaust denial cartoon films have been made and have been freely available on youtube.  They reflect the crudest type of anti-semiticism, images straight out of German Nazi propaganda.  This is another stain on the reputation of President Ahmadinejad, a man who not only has the blood of thousands of his own citizens on his hands, but has become the world's most reknowned Holocaust denier, having organised a state sponsored conference for holocaust deniers in 2006.  His antics are simply the most absurd form of political shenanigans.

Meanwhile, an intersting and sensitive art exhibition, This Storm is What we call Progress opened this week in London's Imperial War Museum. Part of the exhibtion, entitled Will You Dance For Me? depicts an 85-year-old dancer rocking back and forth in a chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Her punishment for refusing to dance at an SS officer’s party was to stand barefoot in the snow, and she pledged that if she survived she would dedicate her life to dance. The artist, London based Israeli Ori Gersht, speaks about this work, as well as two others, in this short film:


Ori Gersht: This Storm is What We Call Progress from Photoworks on Vimeo.

10 comments:

  1. Great read! I did not know that about Ahmadinejad (or I didn't know the extent). I must visit the IWM soon. I keep wanting to spend more time researching and reading about the Holocaust and to continue learning about genocide but I have not found the time.

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  2. Thanks Emm, A good newish book on the subject is Bloodlands from Timothy Snyder. It places the Holocaust within a broader perspective of mass killing by Germany and USSR.

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  3. The video is very interesting. I had not heard of Gersht's work. The whole exhibition sounds intriguing.

    Thank you for posting this. I believe we all should do something to keep the knowledge (and horror) of the events circulating and never let them fade from the public consciousness.

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  4. Thanks Chris. Yes, I think it is important, especially for Europeans, to bear witness for the crimes of our recent past.

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  5. That was very brave of Turkey. And moral. Turkey has to face its own internal critics as well as hardline nations to its east. Yet Turkey understands struggle and oppression, and would want to honour its Jewish neighbour and (largely) its closest ally.

    That raises a separate issue for Turkey - its own memorial day for the Armenian Massacres of 1915.

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  6. Thanks for your comment Hels.
    Interesting thing is that Israel supports the official Turkish stance on the Armenian genocide,i.e. there wasn't one.

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  7. I did not know that Paul. Do you know what Israel's stance on the Srebrenica genocide is? I saw a video by a right-of-centre Jewish organisation in New York offering support to the Serbs in terms of both Jews and Serbs being victims in the Holocaust and thus supporting the notion that Serbs were victims in Srebrenica and not perpetrators. It made me upset [understatement] but also showed the power of propaganda and media.

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  8. Thanks for your comment Emm. The ICTY in The Hague declared the massacre in Srebrenica to be an act of gemocide. Those involved in it are saught after as potential war criminals. Isreal accepts this and last year Israel arrested and extradicted one of the leadeing suspects - they extradicted him to Bosnia. So Israel has cooperated fully with the international hunt on Serb war criminals.

    By the war, Israel does not deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed by Turkish forces. But they are seen as victims of a war, not a deliberate policy of genocide.

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    1. Thanks Paul. I follow the trials at the ICTY, ICTR and in Cambodia, hence my interest. I wonder if they would change their stance if Armenia were declared to be a genocide. I doubt that would happen though as there are no more perpetrators to prosecute and therefore, there would not be a tribunal to declare it as such. I guess that is why there is such pressure on the US to recognise it.

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    2. I think it is a mistake for states to make a historical judgement. Parliamentarians have no special qualification when it comes to judging events of nearly 100 years. This should, I think, be left to historians rather than lawyers. Switzerland has recognised the Armenian massacres to be genocide and has made it illegal to deny this. I've published an article on this sometime ago, in case you are interested: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7286

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