We are very worried, and rightly so, in front of the fireworks and the books sent to the new hell where the damned are languishing. But don’t these works burn more in the memories? Who pushes to read the treasures of the past that much, anyway? Without many borrowings from libraries, the faster masterpieces will be pounded. By dint of looking up at general culture, accused of being elitist, yet a real safeguard and a beacon of scout in our nights, ignorance becomes the norm and blindness its term.
Take the anti-vaccines parading in the street with their signs that associate the imposition of the health passport to the fate of the Jews under the Nazi boot. They believe they feel the historical weight of the yellow star on their t-shirt or on their jacket by tinkering with recent ones. Quite a coquetry! “Same oppression; same fight for the pariahs of yesterday and today! »They shout in the demonstrations. To all those, for whom the Holocaust was only a dress rehearsal intended to pave the way for the tortures of a general vaccination demanded in the name of the common good, we say: do your research. See! Read !
The Third Reich is far enough behind to pour night and fog on the annals of mankind, leaving to rising generations only vague clichés of persecution, recovered to better wrap themselves in it. But the families of the survivors of the concentration camps, the whole Jewish community by extension, do not hear it that way and cry out indecently. We weren’t there when the Jews of so many European countries had the infamous star imposed on themselves like the master’s seal on cattle. Not there, when they were crammed into stadiums, then crowded trains, before being spat out in camps to be enslaved or burnt. But how to plead innocence?
Not there, but transformed by certain testimonies on the screen, in writing. At least those of us who have plugged into it. May new readers arise! Because Nazism will have shattered humanist illusions forever. These dashing SS people torturing and serial killing crowds of innocent people before going back to listen to Wagner and Brahms were so-called sophisticated beings! Barbarism flourishes everywhere, proclaims this terrible episode and has not finished obscuring our minds. Recent history bears witness to this under all meridians. The fact remains that the Holocaust, by its disproportion, stands as the record for the worst to be exceeded.
To those who make amalgamations between the vaccine capable of saving lives and the process of extermination of an entire people, we recommend diving in deep water in works written in the past in red ink.
Of course, documentaries on Hitler’s reign are shown on TV, fiction films still testify, but the survivors are fewer and fewer over the decades. Listening to their voices is to touch the unthinkable with the tip of your finger and bow to the memory of those who faced it.
We were not there, but the Italian Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, takes us through the small door into the daily life of an extermination camp through his testimony If it’s a man. Syears of having been there, one seizes in black fragments, the infinite fear in front of the executioners, the lack of solidarity of the starving prisoners, even if the author himself considered himself incapable of translating such an experience of dehumanization; or even to consider it: “We will not come back,” he wrote. No one will leave here who could bring to the world, with the sign imprinted in his flesh, the grim news of what the man at Auschwitz could have done with another man. “
Not there, but Elie Wiesel was there. And penetrate his memories in The night, where he also described Birkenau-Auschwitz, its chimneys, the smell of burnt flesh, the Buna camp, then the great final march of the walking dead surrounded by Nazis fleeing the Allied troops, it is to feel a little in our flesh on which nourishes a programmed decline. Indeed, Elie Wiesel had even turned away from his dying father who implored his presence, to avoid being beaten, and the shame of his attitude never left him.
Not there, but we will have seen in several parts at the cinema Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, without a voiceover, without archive images, without experts commenting on the matter; just interviews of survivors and their executioners, which chilled the blood. Everything is accessible on the Internet, even this documentary of more than nine hours by the voices of direct witnesses. After seeing that, who would dare to refer to it again to compare itself? We weren’t there, poor excuse! The culture of ignorance is the main cemetery of works capable of enlightening humanity.