Never Forget! Never Again!

On this day in 1945 Soviet troops entered and “liberated” the Auschwitz concentration camp, where over one million people were murdered by the Nazis including almost a million Jews. Since 2006, this date has been observed as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Don’t think it can happen again? In the United States, a 2018 survey showed that 66% of millennials could not identify Auschwitz. A 2017 European poll revealed that about a third of the 7,000 European respondents across seven countries knew “just a little or nothing at all” about the Holocaust.

More disturbingly, shirts with “Camp Auschwitz” or “6MWE,” as in 6 Million Wasn’t Enough, have been seen with increasing frequency in gatherings of right-wing extremists in the US. Of course, the American Left is increasingly hostile to Israel and much of that hostility has to stem from anti-Semitism.

Why the animus towards Jews? Maybe it’s as Mark Twain wrote in the 19th century:

“I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business…In Berlin, a few years ago, I read a speech which frankly urged the expulsion of the Jews from Germany; and the agitator’s reason was as frank as his proposition.

It was this: that eighty-five per cent of the successful lawyers of Berlin were Jews, and that about the same percentage of the great and lucrative businesses of all sorts in Germany were in the hands of the Jewish race! Isn’t it an amazing confession? It was but another way of saying that in a population of 48,000,000, of whom only 500,000 were registered as Jews, eight-five per cent. of the brains and honesty of the whole was lodged in the Jews.”

I have written these figures before and I don’t know if they are still exactly accurate, but they are close enough for this purpose. Jews comprise only two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population, but have been awarded:

37% of Nobel Prizes in Economics

26% of Nobel Prizes in Physics

25% of Nobel Prizes in Medicine

19% of Nobel Prizes in Chemistry

AND

25% of the Fields Medals in Mathematics, which is the ultimate honor in that discipline

Obviously, no other group remotely approaches that level of achievement, per capita or otherwise. I am not going to offer reasons or an explanation because such an endeavor is not really relevant. The facts are what they are.

Never Forget! Never Again!