ALEX BRUMMER: How grotesque of pro

Release time：2024-05-08 10:23:05 Source：Culture Channel news portal

Nothing could be more grotesque than the sight of pro-Palestinian protesters at the gates of Auschwitz yesterday as Jews around the world marked Yom HaShoah.

That's the day of remembrance for the six million souls who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

As the son of a refugee from the horrors of the Holocaust, I can feel nothing but contempt for the ignorance, gross insensitivity and misguided hatred which inspired such a protest.

Auschwitz, which I have visited several times, is at the heart of my own personal story. My dear grandparents Sandor and Fanya perished in the gas chambers there.  Sandor is a Hungarian version of Alexander – and I am named after him.

Pro-Palestine protesters wave flags as the annual Holocaust remembrance event, the 'March of the Living' in memory of the six million Holocaust victims takes place in Oswiecim, Poland, Monday, May 6, 2024

Participants carry Israel's flag as they walk past the entrance gate during the 36th March of the Living at the former Nazi concentration death camp Auschwitz

Pro-Palestine protesters hold Palestinian flags and banners showing victims of Israeli bombardments

They were transported in horrific conditions from their home on the Hungarian-Czech border to Auschwitz as Adolf Eichmann, architect of the so-called Final Solution, rushed to kill the Jews of Hungary in the desperate last days of World War II.

Auschwitz, where these disgraceful protesters gathered, is the unmarked burial ground for my grandparents' ashes.

My elderly aunt Sussie and cousin Sheindy had been teenagers at Auschwitz and Belsen but survived and are alive to this day. What they will make of the protesters who waved flags, heckled and chanted as Israelis took part in the March Of The Living – the annual walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau – I cannot imagine.

The images now circulating of the protesters are indescribably disturbing. They can only bring back memories of those final moments Sheindy shared with my grandparents when my grandmother Fanya squeezed her hand and told her to lie about her age to avoid the gas chambers. Claiming she was older, and could work, meant that Sheindy lived, not died. The outrage perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 has brought back the most terrifying memories for these two women – memories of pillage, mutilation and starvation.

The Holocaust, or Shoah to use the Hebrew word, was the deliberate, industrial-scale killing of Jews.  It is bad enough that pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas sympathisers have chosen to steal the language of the Holocaust.  Any comparison between Israel's retaliation and the monstrous genocide of the 1940s is odious and anti-Semitic.

Now they have besmirched the sacred memory of those gassed, shot and burnt in the great incinerators of the death camps.

There are no words.

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