An archive of infinite value

Google has done all mankind a signal service by helping to put online the historical resources of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem based centre for remembering the Holocaust.

The work of this kind of research centre grows increasingly more important and valuable every day, as the last survivors die, and as hundreds of millions of children worldwide grow up history-illiterate (or, what is just as bad, unconcerned), and so they can be fed any nonsense, any vile and motivated garbage about what some of our ancestors did to their contemporaries.

Holocaust denial has become a kind of industry in many parts of the world. They say everything from ‘It never happened’, to ‘it was vastly exaggerated’. As if saying that ‘only’ fifty thousand or a hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered like sheep somehow makes the crime less ghastly, less mind-numbing than saying the number was close to six million; or as if saying a few million Jews were ‘only’ thrown out of their jobs and houses and countries, or robbed and beaten and raped and jailed as a national mission-cum-pastime for years together for no crime they had committed except the fact that they were Jews makes the horror less damning, more tolerable. I dare anyone who knows what it means to be human, to be a father/mother, a son/daughter or a husband/wife, and who knows about the Holocaust, to stand up and assert that a) it wouldn’t matter to him/her if it happened to ‘only’ his dearest one, and that b) knowing physics is ‘more important’ than knowing that kind of history, so s/he just doesn’t ‘have time’ for that kind of knowledge.

It didn’t happen to Jews only in Germany or German-occupied territories such as Poland during World War II, by the way. To cite just one instance, the Nazis did the Russians a service of incalculable value by deflecting the world’s attention from the record of the endless pogroms in which heaven knows how many million Jews suffered and died. And there are many countries, if truth be known, which have no right to hold their heads high over their record of treating the Jews, though they might never have descended to downright, cold-blooded mass slaughter.

And it hasn’t happened only to Jews, either. Even if we restrict our attention to the 20^th century alone, humans of every description who were unfortunate enough to be hated and weak minorities in the countries where they lived have been humiliated and slaughtered savagely in vast numbers, in all places from south America to the Balkans to Africa, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. No one who has had both the energy and the stomach to go through that history of endless night should dare to say that the 20^th century was an era of spectacular and unsullied ‘progress’. No one except the technology-drunk (and also personally unaffected) can make a claim like that.

I carry no brief for what the state of Israel stands for today, nor have any wish to defend it if in their historical turn the Jews have turned oppressors in some places (about which, though, there can be more than one opinion). But using Holocaust denial to bash the Israel of today is not just ignorant and silly, it is diabolical. And the same goes for all those elsewhere on earth who want to forget or deny what their forefathers did because it makes them ashamed to call themselves human beings.

Keep up the good work, Yad Vashem. Your kind of work is of ever-increasing necessity. I can vouch for the ignorance and unconcern of only a very tiny section of the human population – to wit, teenagers who are studying in my town for the secondary board examination and have to read about the Holocaust as part of a short chapter on the Second World War in history – and I know just how clueless they are, all of them. If I can get even a handful of them to click on the links provided here (and I am not very hopeful) I shall consider that I have been doing my job well.

[You can go to their photo archive and take a look for yourself.]