70 YEARS LATER THE SURVIVING HOSTAGES HE WILL BE THERE!… Let us hear their voice…
"On January 27 the whole world will hear the voices of Auschwitz." With this slogan the video begins [see it here] who prepared it Auschwitz Museum for this year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day, presenting photographs from his archive with the names of some of the pictured hostages, as identified through research. Photographs are not just documents, and they are certainly not impersonal documents. They depict people like us, like everyone, with a name and country and family.
How did civilized humanity come to allow the Holocaust to take place? The Holocaust Memorial Museum of the USA tries to answer this question, with the documentary produced by it "The Road to the Nazi Genocide" [see it here]. Aim: to encourage thought, review and reflection on the responsibilities for the crime of genocide of 6 million Jews.
The same is the message that the World Jewish Congress (WJC) wanted to convey with the "The Past is Present" initiative, gathering hostage survivors from all over the world, at the ceremony on 27th January, which will take place next Tuesday, at the site of the extermination camp that has identified its name with the Holocaust. The response was movingly great for the elderly hostages who - 70 years after their own personal drama - will be back in the frozen Auschwitz to declare that they ARE HERE, irrefutable witnesses of the consequences of the prevalence of the ideology of hatred and racism, for to show the camp number in their hands again, to a world that seems to have long since forgotten.
More: AUSCHWITZ, 27.1.2015: INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
By Nikolas Sevastakis*, by JOURNAL OF THE AUTHORSLa Javie, 8.9.14
The complications that marked the difficult gestation of the anti-racism bill naturally opened up new fields of debate and controversy. Last in the series, the intervention of 152 historical scholars who request the withdrawal of Article 2 of the bill, with the main argument that it poses risks both to freedom of speech and to a cool and unbiased public debate on all issues of the past.
Concerns about free speech and the rights of historical researchers are, unfortunately, justified. In this country, more than elsewhere, there is a demand to adjust scientific knowledge to a nationally correct or state "approved" opinion. And of course for a large part of society, political and ecclesiastical factors, everything that casts shadows of doubt on aspects of our national heritage is considered... suspicious and anti-Greek. How can one not be suspicious when we see that even an archaeological excavation turns overnight into a communication/political tool of the moment?
of STAVROS JIMA
A message of vigilance to the peoples so that humanity does not relive the Nazi horror was sent yesterday from the Dachau concentration camp, which was visited by the Ecumenical Patriarch Mr. Bartholomew.
Orthodox metropolitans and clerics, Catholic and evangelical bishops, Jewish and Muslim priests, with the Ecumenical Patriarch, Mr. Bartholomew, a prayer "for the repose of the souls" of the thousands of prisoners who died there in horrific conditions during the Nazi period in Germany was sent to the Dachau concentration camp yesterday.
At the same time, they issued a message of vigilance to the people so that humanity would "never again" experience the Nazi horror.