I read with interest the scholarly thesis of both Dr. Catherine Chatterley
and Dr. Adam Muller on the Holocaust. An important and thoughtful debate
between 2 scholars. However those of us who are Holocaust survivors and
don’t function on a scholarly level we need to be reminded of the real
reason of why the Holocaust happened and why it was a success beyond the
dreams of most anti-semites.
For a 1000 years Christians were taught from
the Pulpits of their Churches and on the knee of their parents that Jews
killed their God. It was an easy sell for the Nazis to turn the Christians
of Europe into enthusiastic collaborators who turned over their Jewish
neighbors for transport to slave and death camps. My father was one of
those Jews who spent 2/12 years in a slave labor camp in Basarabia because
a 6 year old Romanian child who was a neighbour showed the Romanian’s where
my father was hiding. My father was one of only 700 survivors in a camp of
3500 young Jewish men who was liberated by the advancing Russian Army in
1944. How would a 6 year old know to turn in a Jewish neighbour? This story
was repeated millions of times in every country that the Nazis occupied.
Without the help of the citizens of those countries, the Germans final
solution would have been much more difficult.
Abe Silverman, Alberta