The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz was marked couple of days ago with commemoration at the Jewish Community in Sarajevo.
Rare Holocaust survivors, representatives of BiH governments, international community, academic and religious communities, NGOs and other guests, on the occasion of 27 January, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, held a minute of silence and paid tribute to the victims of the pogrom and all the innocent victims of the Second World War and the war of the early nineties in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Jakob Finci, President of the Jewish Community in BiH, said that the Holocaust wiped out some six million Jews, which means tragedy of all the humanity, not just the Jewish people.
“104,000 new names have been introduced last year in the records of Yad Vashem Institute,” he said.
Mladen Ivanić, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, told his memory of the visit to Auschwitz long time ago, when he concluded that one can only wish that something like that never happens to anyone ever again.
He expressed satisfaction that the Council of Ministers has established annual marking of the Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“One of the reasons that, particularly we in Bosnia and Herzegovina have reason to remember is the fact that many people died here during World War II and in the recent war on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Chairman of the BiH Presidency.
Professor of history from Germany Michael Brenner at the commemoration held a lecture titled “The long shadow of Auschwitz – Life of Jews in Germany”.
He explained how and why in the first years upon the end of the Second World War, when in some countries of Eastern Europe a danger to Jews had not yet passed, about 20,000 of them still decided to take refuge in Germany, “the killer land”, as it was called back then, at a time when no one believed that on its soil Jewish life would ever exist let alone that the community would grow the fastest, excluding Israel.
These people took refuge in the so-called “American Zone” in Germany because Israel was not yet established as a state, and America, of which they thought, was not sufficiently open to the influx of refugees.
Sometime later they were joined by a dozen of thousands of German Jews who returned to the country after fleeing in all directions from the Holocaust and some 30,000 people from the former 600,000 who had lived in Germany before Hitler, again comprised a little German Jewish community. They remained there even when Israel was founded, and when America opened its borders.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, affected about 200,000 members of the Jewish community in the country that was the source of the greatest evil, and Brenner explains it mainly with economic reasons, but also the fact that Germany in the 1980s began putting a lot more focus on its own history, especially Nazi history, so today in many towns there are museums and other ways of commemorating the memory of the suffering of the Jews.
Brenner emphasizes that as a historian he speaks with caution about the future of this people in Germany, but concludes that today it is not that different from that in other countries.
“But Jews have always been a people of hope. How else could they survive past 3000 years?” said the professor and concluded: “Europe without Jews is not Europe, I think we can say that today”.
Sarajevan Laura Ostojić, born Papo, Levi, on her mother’s side, recalled in her statement to reporters the terrible days of World War II in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when many Jews were taken, members of these two families as well, and she was then just a child, and together with her sister and mother, they somehow managed to survive those dreadful days.
Later on, they fled to Montenegro, in Berane, and after the war, Laura returned to Sarajevo.
The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, 27 January, is marked based on the decision of the United Nations General Assembly.
On that day in 1945, the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz, the most notorious Nazi concentration camp.
With the decision of the Council of Ministers from 16 January 2007, 27 January in Bosnia and Herzegovina is marked as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust.
This year marking was organized by the Jewish community in BiH, in cooperation with the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees, the Goethe Institute, the Institute for Research of War Crimes of the University of Sarajevo and the Bosniak Institute – Adil Zulfikarpašić Foundation.
(Source: Fena)
