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SPEAKING
FREELY
Of martyrs
and heroes
By Maggie
Mitchell Salem
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
Courage is
resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence
of fear. - Mark Twain (1835 -
1910)
To see what is right, and not to
do it, is want of courage or of principle. -
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
The pomp and solemnity which marked the
60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on
May 9 was an occasion to reflect on the still
incomprehensible horror of global warfare and
genocide that ravaged Europe and Asia. More than
100 million people died in the war, soldiers and
civilians; men, women and children; the elderly
and infants. Killing fields stretched from the
Atlantic to the Pacific.
World War II
should have instilled one invaluable lesson: no
country, culture or ethnic group has a monopoly on
the trade craft of terror, or the courage
necessary to defeat it.
Adolf Hitler's
"Final Solution" singled out Jews for wholesale
extermination; the handicapped, too, and also
gypsies, Catholics, Poles and resistance fighters.
His rampage into Russia consumed 27 million lives,
14% of Russia's pre-war population. Japan's brutal
tactics across East Asia left equally indelible
scars. The slaughter, rape and deliberate
starvation of tens of millions of Chinese,
Filipinos, and Koreans remain open wounds and
sources of bilateral tensions between Japan and
its neighbors. You have to wonder if any act of
contrition, including reparations and the often
elusive formal government apology, could ever
atone for such atrocities, even six decades later.
Beijing and Tokyo are still in each
other's crosshairs over an apology, or lack
thereof, from the Japanese government and the
soft-focus treatment of Japan's wartime past in
present-day textbooks.
While China and
Japan duke it out, Russia's newly democratized
former satellite states await an apology from
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, during
the May 9 ceremony in Moscow Putin reminded the
world of the Red Army's rout of the Nazis and the
losses Russia suffered to make that victory
possible.
Then there is the controversy
that swirls around the new Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, the first monument in
Germany's capital dedicated to remembering the
Nazi era. Some Germans say the focus should be on
the future; others point out that the 2,711
concrete blocks fail to honor the non-Jewish
victims of Hitler's maniacal purges. Truth be
told, the title of the memorial should not be too
great a distraction. In the desolate walkways
between the towering, blank slabs, visitors are
unlikely to focus solely on just one set of
victims - or survivors.
There are at least
500,000 people who will undoubtedly contemplate
the act of fate or God that made their own lives
possible. The Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem, is titled "The Holocaust Martyrs' and
Heroes' Remembrance Authority". Many of those who
survived to catalogue over 6 million murders,
including those of their own family members', were
saved because of "martyrs and heroes" who
recognized that the passivity of those around them
was sanctioning state-sanctioned brutality.
The rescuers turned out to be as
culturally diverse as those committing the
atrocities.
Yad Vashem figures indicate
that 19,141 non-Jewish individuals from 40 nations
took actions to save Jews from concentration
camps. Poland came in first with 5,632 rescuers,
almost a third of the total. The United States had
only one. Even more astounding, Poland was the
only country in which a person and his or her
family would be summarily executed if they were
caught helping Jews to escape.
By July
1940, those Polish Jews who succeeded in escaping
to Lithuania had very few options. Hitler's army
was moving rapidly eastward and to exit the Soviet
Union required a valid visa to another country.
Yet most embassies had already been evacuated in
anticipation of the Nazis' arrival. Only two
consuls remained - acting Dutch Consul Jan
Zwartendijk and Japanese envoy Chiune Sugihara.
These men, and Sugihara's wife, Yukiko, were a
one-two punch to Hitler's evil. Zwartendijk gave
Polish Jews a visa to Curacao and Dutch Guiana,
what is now Suriname. They didn't actually need
the visa, but armed with the bogus entry they then
had a reason to apply for a transit visa from the
Japanese Embassy, a condition for obtaining a
Soviet exit visa.
Tokyo instructed
Sugihara not to issue such visas - but he followed
his conscious instead. From July 31 to August 28,
1940, he and his wife distributed 300 visas a day,
what he normally issued in a single month. He
later handed off his visa stamp to a Jewish
refugee as he and his family boarded a train to
leave Lithuania. Afterward, he rarely spoke of his
actions. Almost 30 years later a survivor found
Sugihara. Other survivors came forward. When asked
why he defied Tokyo, he said, "I may have to
disobey my government, but if I don't I would be
disobeying God."
The Chinese
consul-general in Vienna from 1938-1940, Dr Feng Shan Ho,
faced even greater challenges. While the Japanese
government did not formally approve of Hitler's
anti-Semitic policies, China's Nationalists did.
The Chinese ambassador in Berlin was determined to
maintain warm relations with the Nazis. Dr Ho had
other priorities.
Any Jew who applied for
a visa received one. As with Sugihara survivors,
these visas were for Shanghai - and a sort of
fiction. At the time, Shanghai was under Japanese
occupation. China had nominal, if any, authority.
Word quickly spread and long lines formed
around the Chinese consulate. The Chinese
ambassador in Berlin tried to shut Ho down. He
refused. Even when the Nazis confiscated his
Jewish-owned consulate, he continued to issue
visas elsewhere. After he left Austria, he never
spoke of his actions.
In 1997, a few words
in his obituary identified him to survivors. In
July 2000, Yad Vashem bestowed up him the honor
"Righteous Among Nations", which other rescuers
such as Sugihara and Raoul Wallenberg had
received. The San Francisco-based Visas for Life
estimates that 100 envoys saved 250,000 lives.
Ordinary people did what they could, often hiding
refugees in their homes. The risk was enormous.
The Chinese government recognized Ho's efforts
with an official demerit on his record; Nazi
punishment was far more severe.
Small acts
of extraordinary courage add up. The trouble is
finding enough persons of conscious to take
action. Fortunately, such individuals can be found
worldwide. But so too can the inhumanity they hope
to expose and eradicate.
Maggie
Mitchell Salem is a former special assistant
to US secretary of state Madeleine K Albright; a
former career foreign service officer; former
director of communications and outreach at the
Middle East Institute in Washington, DC; she now
provides Middle East analysis to private and
public sector clients in the US and the region,
including a number of dailies in Arabic and
English.
(Copyright 2005 Maggie
Mitchell Salem)
Speaking Freely is
an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing. |
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