Lessons from the Holocaust

BY SIPIWE MBILI

‘Not to act is to act, not to speak is to speak,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian who was murdered by the Nazis at a concentration camp established to wipe out Europe’s Jewish people.

The genocide of 6 million Jews—the Holocaust or, as Jews call it, the Shoah—remains one of the most terrible experiences in history.

As I look around the Holocaust museum in Cape Town, I see pictures of a huge pit filled of naked, dead bodies. In other photos, people are waiting for trains to take them to their doom. Innocent children, their hair shorn, are locked up, denied education and destined for probable death. I’m unable to tell whether they’re boys or girls.

Adolf Hitler inspired and masterminded this whole operation. Concentration camps were built across Europe, where Jews were imprisoned and used as slaves or killed.

What could have caused such cruelty and brutality? Was it just that Hitler believed that Jews were sub-human? Was it because a Jew was on the board that denied him access to the art school? Or maybe he resented them because a Jew actually helped him when he was freezing in the cold and he felt humiliated at being helped by a representative of a people who were already agitated against in some German-speaking quarters? Maybe they were Hitler’s scapegoats for all his problems.

Hendrik Verwoerd learnt about setting people or races apart in Nazi Germany. The birth of apartheid in South Africa was influenced by the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime saw itself as superior to the Jews and sought to clear their cities of them (at one point considering the mass deportation of Jews to Madagascar!).

Similarly in South Africa, whites dominated blacks and kept them segregated.

“I do not see very far ahead, but when I have arrived where the horizon now closes down, a new prospect will open before me, and I shall meet it with peace,” St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross—Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism and the religious life—prayed as she stared at death, waiting at the concentration camp. Among other Catholic saints who shared in the suffering and death of the Holocaust is St Maximillian Kolbe who sacrificed his life to save a man from a random execution, because that man had a family.

The cruel lessons from the Holocaust and apartheid remind us that we are all made in the image and likeness of God. We are all part of the human race and we should be treating each other as brother and sister.

Former president Nelson Mandela said in his speech from the dock: “If need be, I’m prepared to die” for the equality of people in South Africa.

Why can’t we stand up for peace and justice? Must there always be bloodshed before people act and offer a helping hand?

n Siphiwe Mbili is a seminarian. He visited the Holocaust Museum, in Cape Town as part of a group from at St Francis Xavier Orientation Seminary.