We may well question the silence that surrounded, for five years in Europe, the genocide of the Jews, and that — still more ignored — of the Roma, both perpetrated by the Nazis and their local allies. To believe that, after such a tragedy, humanity would be immunized against racist violence was doubtless an illusion. An illusion shared by a great many — by the Jews in particular, and doubtless too by the résistants who in many countries had risen up to fight Nazi oppression and horror.
“Never again,” they had sworn to themselves at the liberation of Auschwitz, fifty years ago, alongside the few thousand Jewish survivors.
Half a century after the Shoah, we must nonetheless acknowledge that violence and racism, both in Europe and elsewhere, have not disappeared but have, on the contrary, recovered a force unknown for several decades.
The violence of those nostalgic for Nazism strikes the Jews in particular through the desecration of their cemeteries. But far-right violence also expresses itself in Western Europe through racist and xenophobic schemes, going as far as murder — as was the case for Turkish workers in Germany, or very recently in Austria for Roma. This violence also takes on the face of ethnic cleansing and ethnic massacres, in Bosnia or in Rwanda, or again in Sudan.
Another type of violence is that of the Islamist fundamentalist wave breaking over the Mediterranean basin, with its train of kidnappings and assassinations.
In Algeria the dead already number in the tens of thousands. The Armed Islamic Groups there kidnap and kill by preference all those who matter in culture and creation: men and women of the theater, singers, journalists, writers and intellectuals. If they are democrats and secular, they are the designated victims of those who wish to return Algeria to obscurantism and barbarism.
In the Middle East, the murderous anti-Israeli attacks perpetrated by Palestinian Islamists aim to derail the fragile reconciliation under way between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
In the face of this violence, what can we do, as humanist and secular Jews, but defend precisely our values, which place man and his dignity at the center of all concern.
To call for the struggle against intolerance. To call for respect for the plurality of cultures, and for pluralism — including within the Jewish community, where nationalist or fundamentalist temptations are also coming to light.
This is also why a present-day reflection on the Bible, on the history of the Jewish people in its diversity, can help us remain vigilant and active in the face of the violence that tends to install itself as a system, after the death of the last of the great totalitarian systems, Soviet communism.
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is also to remain vigilant today.
Izio Rosenman