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It is evil to forget

In 2005 the 60th Anniversary of the Allied Liberation of Auschwitz (which was finally liberated in 1945), was marked, but the question asked at this 60th Anniversary was whether the Allies had done enough to stop the slaughter of the Jews. In Sri Lanka, Anne Ranasinghe will keep giving us, in prose and verse, her chronicles of the suffering of her people under the Nazi regime.

Her Holocaust Poems (At What Dark Point) and her recent collection of essays, poems and two detailed papers by Klaus Harpprecht and Professor Leonard Mars (A LONG HOT DAY) carry much of her outraged feelings.

Sanctioned measures

As a child she was Anneliese Katz, and wen she fled from Germany to Britain she was 13 years old. Then, six months later, came the Second World War, and she never saw her parents again.

In his essay on Anne, Harpprecht tells of how the people of this country knew little about Germany and the Nazi period - 'about the war, and the horrors that were perpetrated; nothing about the destruction of the democratic way of life, the intolerance and oppression; about the concentration and death camps; and the officially-planned and sanctioned measures to commit mass murder.' Anne had to come to terms with this horrendous past, and as the past returned to haunt her, 'it jolted her into a renewed awareness of her identity.' As Anne herself declared: 'memory is our shield, our only shield.'

Jewish community

Anne came to this Island in 1952, and she now says: 'Looking back at my beginnings and the strange turns my life has taken, I wonder to what extent anyone is ever really in control, - Let me now illustrate, as best as I can, what we should know about the Holocaust. It is an evil we should never forget, just as we should never dismiss from memory the evil of the JVP and LTTE atrocities that benumbed this land.

Until the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler's policy was to expel as many Jews as possible. Britain admitted a number of Jewish refugees, and, after the horrors of the so-called Kristallnacht in November 1938 (of which Anne tells us in A Long Hot Day), there was an increasing exodus; till, by 1940 approximately 72 percent of Germany's Jewish community had fled the country. But with Hitler's rapid conquest of Western Europe, many Jewish citizens of those countries as well as the German Jewish refugees were trapped. The invasion of Poland and Russia finally sealed the fate of millions the updated second edition 2009 of a Long Hot Day (183 pages, priced at Rs. 500) is available at all major book shops.

Nazi territories

In the latter months of 1939 Britain halted all Jewish immigration from areas under Nazi control. World-War-Two was in the offing, and no country wanted to take a chance with a flood of refugees from Nazi territories. In fact, Britain interned many Jewish refugees as 'enemy aliens.' (Anne had to go before a Court of Law before being allowed to stay at her school in Dorset, a 'Restricted Area.')

In his book, The Myth of Rescue (1997) William D. Rubinstein argued that all countries, facing the threat of Nazi invasion, were justified in this policy of exclusion. From 1940 onwards, Hitler forbade Jews to leave Nazi occupied countries, and even those who did manage to escape seemed to have disappeared. Neutral Switzerland sent thousands of refugees, who with great difficulty reached its border, back to Germany, to certain death.

The Arabs were also sensitive to this crisis. At the end of 1939, Britain restricted the number of Jews to Palestine to 75,000. With Churchill installed as prime minister in 1940, Italy also entered the war and brought fighting closer to the Middle East. There followed the tragedy of the refugee ship 'Struma' (carrying Jews from Romania) that was denied entry to Palestine, and ended up torpedoed in the Black Sea with a total loss of life.

Anne tells us how Hitler began to herd Jews into ghettos, then in 1941 started on a programme of organized murder. Churchill learnt of the massacres as early as 1941, and of the plan to annihilate the whole Jewish race by 1942, when two Slovak Jews escaped from Auschwitz to tell the world what was happening. Let us take Anne's poem 'Report of a Long Hot Day':

(Josefow, Poland, July 1942 Reserve Police Battalion 101-in conjunction with the Wehrmacht, German Army)

Shady woods

At three in the morning we were ordered to gather all Jews in the market place. Some tried to hide but we chased them out of their cellars and attics and from under the floor boards. No one escaped.

We then loaded them into lorries men, women and also the children, and drove them to the edge of the wood - (the woods are beautiful here in Poland, cool and shady in the heat of summer) forced them (with whips) out of the lorries and surrounded them. Then each reservist pointed with his finger, and the Jew so chosen had to walk with him into the forest where he shot him, returned, pointed to the next one, led him to the same clearing and shot him too. And so on.

Bone splinters

It was a short walk they made together, the one who was to do the shooting and the one to be shot, a few minutes to get to known one another. Some of the policemen were familiar with their victims as they came from the same town in Germany. When the Jews saw the bodies of those who had gone before them there were screams, tears, prayers. Also some resistance.

At first it was not easy for the reservists - after all, they are ordinary men from ordinary families, and shooting people in the back of the head can be very messy (they are spattered with blood, bone splinters and bits of brain). But after a while they got used to it, and in the end they competed with each other who could kill the most the fastest.It was a long hot day. None of the Jews survived. - Carl Muller

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