Sixty years after liberation, Jews must lead fight against hatred

On April 17, hundreds of Holocaust survivors from the United States, Israel, Canada, France and elsewhere gathered on the site of the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

They had come together with their children and grandchildren to observe the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. I was privileged to participate in the commemoration beside the Jewish monument my father had inaugurated in the midst of mass graves in April 1946. Because my parents are no longer alive, I spoke in their stead, on their behalf, hearing their voices in my mind.

It is from Bergen-Belsen that the horrors of the Holocaust first permeated the consciousness of humankind. Long before Auschwitz became the defining term of the Shoah, the films and photographs taken by British soldiers and journalists in April 1945 of both the dead and the survivors of Bergen-Belsen - shown in newsreels throughout the world - awakened the international community to the genocide committed against the Jews of Europe.

At Belsen, the British found themselves in Ezekiel's valley of dry bones. More than 10,000 bodies lay scattered about the camp, and the 58,000 surviving inmates - the overwhelming majority of whom were Jews - suffered from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, extreme malnutrition and other virulent diseases.

My mother and father were liberated here. For more than five years following the liberation, my father headed both the Jewish Committee of the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp and the Central Jewish Committee in the British Zone of Germany. I am one of more than 2,000 children born in Bergen-Belsen between 1946 and 1950.

We, the children and grandchildren of the survivors, were proud to be at Belsen on April 17 alongside our parents and grandparents. We know that we were given life and placed on earth with a solemn obligation. Our parents and grandparents survived to bear witness. We in turn must ensure that their memories, which we have absorbed into ours, remain as a permanent warning to humanity.

Sixty years after the liberation of Belsen, anti-Semitism remains a threat, not just to the Jewish people, but to civilization as a whole, and Holocaust deniers are still allowed to spread their poison.

In France, Great Britain and the United States, the number of anti-Semitic incidents has increased markedly during the past year. The same weekend that we were in Belsen, several white American supremacist groups were scheduled to celebrate Hitler's birthday with concerts in Michigan and New Jersey.

Earlier this year, right-wing members of the state parliament of Saxony in Germany disrupted a tribute to the victims of Nazism; in Russia, nationalist and Communist members of the Duma called on the Russian Prosecutor General to outlaw Jewish organizations; and the mayor of London saw fit to compare a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.

Sixty years after the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau stopped burning our families, innocent men, women and children are murdered in a horrific genocide in Darfur. Sixty years after the surviving remnant of European Jewry emerged from the inferno of the 20th century, government-sponsored terrorists continue to seek the destruction of the State of Israel, which arose out of the ashes of the Shoah.

Thus, we do not have the right to focus only on the agony and suffering of the past. While the Germans were able to torture, to murder, to destroy, they did not succeed in dehumanizing their victims. The ultimate victory of European Jews over the Nazis and their multinational accomplices was firmly rooted in their human, ethical values.

The critical lesson we have learned from our parents' and grandparents' tragic experiences is that indifference to the suffering of others is in itself a crime. We may not be passive, or allow others to be passive, in the face of oppression, for we know only too well that the ultimate consequence of apathy and silence was embodied forever in the flames of Auschwitz and the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen.