The Holocaust

The horrors of the Holocaust are immense and one shudders to think that it lasted not days but years (“The Holocaust and its implications,” Jan. 27). That a pogrom could last so long is pathetic. It only underlines the fact that civilisation is not about attire; it is in the minds of people. Identifying people belonging to a race, denying them rations, preventing them from conducting business and persecuting them systematically were acts of thuggery, not nationalism as claimed by the Nazis. Today, the Jews have Israel. They must be allowed the right to have a land.

But wait, the Roma gypsies and communists were also targeted by the Nazi thugs. But their sufferings are generally downplayed in any narrative of the Holocaust. It is time to include them too.

Raghu Seshadri,

Chennai

The article retells the story of one of history's worst genocides. The fact that barbaric extermination of peoples has continued shows that mankind is yet to overcome and outgrow the savagery of prehistoric times. If we examine the history of mass murders we can observe a thread of common factors running through them — the overwhelming presence of a megalomaniac, falsification of history through propaganda, indoctrination and conspiracy theories, use of military power, ultra-nationalism and, above all, acquiescence of the large majority.

V.N. Mukundarajan,

Thiruvananthapuram

Quite paradoxically, the victims of the Holocaust, with whom the whole world sympathised, have turned out to be the perpetrators of a slow genocide in Palestine. The only ‘crime' the people of Palestine committed was they accepted the victims of the Holocaust in their land. Let us indeed agree that we need the three commandments Professor Yehuda Bauer has referred to.

K.K. Abdul Raoof,

Hyderabad

The learned professor will have to answer one question — why are the Israelis, who suffered so much, inure to the sufferings of the Palestinians? Their behaviour is like that of an occupational force. They do not seem to think even for a moment that Palestinians have nowhere to go. Hitler stays condemned. But Jews too are yet to earn the universal approval of people.

K.S. Parthasarathy,

Bangalore