Victims

Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), general and prime minister of Israel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, visiting Auschwitz on 20 April 1993, pronounced these words: «Every handful of earth, in this cursed place, is soaked in the blood of the victims.

Every one of the now silent barracks of this terrible camp heard the screams of the tortured. Every dividing wall here is a wailing wall. Every rusty barbed wire in this city of death bears among its spines the bloodless bodies of our brothers, and the wind here will always carry the smoke of the ovens on its wings.

Faced with hunger, isolation, humiliation, cold and torture, who could have behaved differently? They did not go to the slaughter like lambs. Here an abandoned nation died, a people left to their own devices. Fifty years have passed, and the screams still tear our eardrums. Even though the well of tears ran dry long ago, we do not forget and we do not forgive.

The frightened eyes of the brothers who left the world of the living without knowing why, their furtive glances seeking a salvation destined not to come, their screams, their tears and their suffocated crying still ring in our ears. All our annals, from the dawn of our days to eternity, fade before the shadow of the most horrendous crime in history.

Everywhere we go in Israel, the memory of the Holocaust, with the pain it caused us and the lessons it taught us, walks with us. We are not broken. Despite the defenseless condition of those who were here, despite the black desperation and the march towards the places of death - the gallows, the gas chambers and the incinerators - the nation of Israel lives! We rose from the ashes of the victims and created a nation, a state rich in moral, cultural and intellectual qualities, and endowed with military power. Today, fifty years later, we have enough strength and enough spiritual resources to face the imperatives of the time, to repel enemies, to build a home and to grant asylum to the persecuted. And we have enough strength and enough spirit to defeat anyone who wishes evil, and to extend our hand to our enemies in a sign of peace."

Yitzhak Rabin will be killed by a fanatical Jew who is an enemy of peace. After another thirty years, we are still in Auschwitz. We haven't learned anything. The land of Jesus is always "soaked in the blood of the victims".

Renzo Agasso

NP Novembre 2023