Let the present not blind us to the past
I AM writing to complain about the hijacking of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day event to screen an Al Jazeera documentary on Gaza: Al Shifa The Crimes they Tried To Bury.
No matter how one feels about the recent conflict, such an event is not a platform for political posturing by those not directly affected by the Holocaust. A similar event occurred in Ireland this week, resulting in the removal of Jews who had turned their backs on President Higgens, in protest against his address where he said the Holocaust was “an attempted genocide”.
The documentary is not only offensive, but inappropriate given South Africa’s role in the industrial-scale euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population 80 years ago – a role our country refuses to acknowledge.
Here is what they don’t teach you in our local history books:
One year before the 1938 Evian Conference in France, Minister of the Interior under the Smuts government, D F Malan passed a piece of Antisemitic legislation aimed at preventing
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. The last ship to arrive before the law went into effect, the SS Stuttgart, was met by Malan’s brown-shirts (copycats of Hitler’s brown-shirted Nazi thugs) in Table Bay with force.
South Africa later attended the Evian Conference where world leaders discussed the “Jewish Problem” and vowed to act collectively to not allow the deportation of German Jews under Hitler to continue.
With thousands entering British Palestine, both the British and Arabs began a well-publicised campaign to stop the flood. Palestinian leader Amin al-husseini, later president of the All-palestine government in Gaza (1948-1956), met Hitler in November 1941, appealing to the Fuhrer to deal with the problem. By that time, the Farhud (Arabic for pogrom), a violent dispossession of Jews from the Middle East & North Africa at the behest of Husseini, was well under way.
By January 1942, Adolf Eichmann was presenting his plan for “The Final Solution”, a “solution” to precisely the topic under discussion by our own government. Thus at the Wannsee Conference, in the south-western Berlin, and with Hitler notably absent, the Nazi Party delivered its infamous address to the German High Command. A diabolical plan to deal with the 11 million Jews then under Nazi Occupation.
Husseini would later tour the Trebben “concentration camp’ murder factory, as he enthusiastically supported the Nazis in their endeavor to ‘kill all the Jews’. DAVID ROBERT LEWIS Cape Town