Letter to the editor: We must do more than simply remember the Holocaust’s victims

Take it further

I felt ire and irony as I reviewed reports about world leaders commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I read and reread the stories about the tributes to the victims. I looked for statements of contrition and did not find any. The only mention I saw of the world’s silence during these atrocities (not an adequate word) was in two sentences of a commentary by Ronald S. Lauder in The Jerusalem Post: “When the world was silent, millions of innocent people were systematically murdered in cold blood.”

Our beloved country and government were full of anti-Semites before and during World War II. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 severely limited the number of Jews (and other “undesirables”) from entering the United States. In effect, it closed the doors to Jews in their time of need. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic administration in 1939 rejected pleas from German Jewish refugees to enter the United States and sent the SS St. Louis back to Europe, where more than one-third of the 1,000 passengers were delivered to the Nazis, who murdered them.

Several conferences were convened to do something about the massacres. Evian, 1938. Bermuda, 1943. The subject: how to help Jews being murdered in Germany and occupied European countries. The answer: nothing.

Rather than gathering at Auschwitz, we should expect to find contrition and apology. The only country to do so has been Canada. Now that anti-Semitism is again rearing it murderous head, verbally and physically, it would be the right time to criminalize hatred of Jews. It would more effective than world leaders memorializing dead Jews.

- Sol Koenigsberg, Overland Park