LALLOUZ INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

Finally some good news: Earlier this year Israel publicly commemorated an Arab.

Into Tel Aviv’s Hall of Remembrance was inducted Khaled Abdelwahhab, a Tunisian who had hidden many Jews during Rommel’s occupation of North Africa. At so many levels that induction was an event to be cheered.

The Holocaust, of course, must never be forgotten. For that reason, as well as from the respect we owe its victims, I – of course – salute and applaud the exhibitions at Auschwitz and Mauthausen, those in Tel Aviv, Washington DC and London. And wherever else there are others. I think there should be more. I think too there should be permanent exhibitions commemorating other atrocities that man has perpetrated on man: slavery, for instance, apartheid, the gulags and the killing fields. And, sadly, many … very many more.

I firmly believe that we need to do all in our power to prevent the barbarities of the Third Reich recurring (of which the Holocaust, it should be remembered, was only the most extreme) – and to prevent others from taking their place. We forget at our peril that, in complete violation of the Geneva Convention, there are torturers today in residence at Guantanemo Bay.

Where The World Meets™

by Gregory Dark

-The Talmud

Dutch citizen, Miep Gies and her coworkers hid Anne Frank and her family during WWII. Gies discovered young Anne’s diary after her arrest and preserved it. She is 98 years old.

The son of an aristocratic family, a then 32-year old Khaled Abdelwahhab hid many Jews when German troops occupied Tunisia in 1942. He died in 1997, however in January, 2007, Abdelwahhab became the first Arab nominated for the Israeli Righteous Among the Nations.

It is an important tool in preventing relapse, the expression of our communal revulsion to such acts, the condemnation of their perpetrators to an eternity of censure.

But, alongside condemning man’s propensity for evil, I think it behoves us also to cheer our capacity for good. I think indeed we owe that to ourselves.

Even in mankind’s darkest hours, there has been light. There is, I believe, always that light. And that light is not of a lone match flickering feebly at the end of a cavernous tunnel; it is rather of vast cathedrals ablaze with candles, glowing with an incandescence much the brighter for the pitch surrounding it.

I do not believe that the two meanings of ‘humanity’ are a semantic coincidence.

It may be that fallibility is one of the traits which defines us as human-beings, but there is another trait which holds hands with that fallibility: some kind of spiritual, if not visceral, commitment to our fellow man.

Anne Frank would not have survived for as long as she did without the incredible courage of Miep Gies and Miep’s co-helpers.

In 1945, between seven and eight million ‘displaced persons’ made their way home across the chaos that had become Europe, about 50,000 Jews survived internment and the death marches, one in three of Holland’s Jews was hidden during the German occupation: I venture to suggest that none of these survivors – not one – would have lived had they not had their own Miep, were it not for some act of heroism and kindness, often extended them by a complete stranger. And whose good-Samaritanism emanated from no other motive than a belief that such is what – finally – being human means.

For every Mengele of the Holocaust, there was a Miep. More than one Miep, actually. Probably tens of Mieps. Possibly hundreds.

I visited the Holocaust exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum. Afterwards I bought a DVD, ‘Anne Frank Remembered’. It was an extended interview with this amazing woman. (Who, I’m sure, thinks of herself as a lot of things, but ‘amazing’ isn’t one of them!) I defy anyone not to be bowled over by the woman’s humility and her modesty, her shrugging off of the heroic mantle.

And that is, of course, one of the central problems: Real heroes, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, are remarkably shy. They “don’t want to talk about it.”

Well, we should encourage them to.

We should not spare their blushes.

Consul Dr. Ho Feng Shan saved thousands of Jews by issuing visas. When 7000 Jews crossed the border into Switzerland and Italy in 1938, many had Chinese visas. Dr. Shan died in San Francisco in 1997 at the age of 96. In 2001, he was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli organization Yad Vashem.

And if they don’t want to talk in the first person, let us hear about these exploits in the third. We also owe that to ourselves. These are stories very well worth their hearing.

Oh so often the hidden is worth the digging. It is dung which is on the surface; diamonds we need to mine. And we are here dealing with a commodity far more valuable than any diamond.

I unreservedly recommend the Holocaust exhibition in London. It is certainly harrowing, but it is also incredibly moving. Many of the exhibits are, of course, sedentary. But slaloming through these are videotaped interviews with survivors – extraordinary people, rendered the more extraordinary by their very ordinariness.

One of the saddest of those interviews was almost the last in the exhibition: a now elderly woman bemoaning how few of the lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust have indeed been learnt.

That seems to me to be one of the war’s ongoing tragedies.

How many more lessons might have been learnt, I wonder, if we had included with our denunciation of the conspicuous thugs an ovation to the inconspicuous champions.

Is it not time we started to sing of unsung heroes?

And not because they deserve it – which they so thoroughly do – but because we deserve it: we as a species. It is by such example, finally, that we too will survive.

Sudeten-German Catholic industrialist, Oskar Schindler was the subject of American film director, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 multiple Award-winning film entitled ‘Schindler’s List’ -- the story of 1,100 Jews saved when they were hired to work in Schindler’s enamelware and ammunitions factories, thereby saving them from a fate of being shipped off to Nazi concentration camps. Oskar Schindler died in 1974.

With a background in theatre, television and film, Gregory Dark, author of ‘The Prophet of the New Millennium’ is working on his next book, ‘The God of the New Millennium’ to be published in November 2007.