The final obscenity.

The year 1941 saw the start of the most frightful chapter in human history. Known as the Holocaust, it was the end point of decades of hatred, envy, and fear.

It was the year Nazi Germany began the mass extermination of Jews in what they called the "final solution to the Jewish problem"

Albert Speer was a senior associate of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. He said: "The regime's anti-Semitism was nothing unusual. Hitler remained within the norms of European tradition." When did this tradition begin?

Based on interpretations of passages in the New Testament and the teachings of Popes and saints, persecution of Jews (anti-Semitism) has been a fact of life for 2,000 years.

In the period between 66 AD and 136, the Romans occupied Palestine. At the end of the occupation, they slaughtered 580,000 Jews and destroyed almost a thousand towns. This marked the beginning of the Diaspora--a scattering of Jews around the world that didn't end until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Landless, powerless Jews were forced to exist as a despised group in foreign countries. All security and national dignity gone, Jews became aliens who lived by permission in many lands and cultures.

This lack of a homeland seemed to bind Jewish communities closer together. Jews maintained the Hebrew language and remained unique in custom, religion, and tradition. They did not marry into or assimilate with other ethnic groups.

Christianity became the religion of Europe in 291 AD. Its followers were taught there was only one God and only one true religion. All other gods were, therefore, false and not to be tolerated.

Early Christians competed with the parent Jewish religion for converts. Hating Jews became a Christian duty. Forced baptisms, confiscation of property, mob attacks, and the burning of Jewish places of worship (synagogues) were commonplace.

Saint Augustine gave his blessing to anti-Semitism. He charged that Jews were lazy, dishonest, and prone to gross sexual perversions. They were also unclean and to be avoided by the faithful, he said.

During the Crusades (1000 to 1348) most of Europe was Roman Catholic. All-powerful Popes condoned the murder, torture, rape, and robbery of non-Christians. Plunder and pillage became acts of faith. Jews were slaughtered in a religious frenzy. Stolen goods were used to finance further attacks on nonChristians.

From 1347 to 1350, one third of Europe's population died of bubonic plague in what has been called The Black Death. Jews were blamed for the disease and the idea of mass conspiracy was introduced. People ignored the fact that the plague was killing Jews while accusing them of poisoning wells with a brew made of spiders, lizards, frogs, the hearts of Christians, and the dough of the consecrated host.

In 1348, an entire village of Jews in France was burned to the ground. In Germany, special houses were designed for the burning of Jews. One entire congregation in Vienna, on the advice of its rabbi, committed suicide to avoid a slow, agonizing death.

In the 1480s, Jews were burned alive throughout Spain. Jewish corpses were often dug up and tied to stakes to be burned. The clergy forbade merchants to sell even food to Jews. Jewish children were kidnapped and forcibly baptized at Easter. During the Protestant Refirmation (1500 to 1599), the Jews were caught between two factions in bloody religious wars.

Then came a spell of relative tolerance in the 17th and 18th centuries in most of Europe. However, in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, Jews were still being slaughtered and incredible atrocities were being committed.

From 1800 to 1899, democratic ideals brought a measure of economic equality to Jews in Western Europe and North America. They were, however, still not accepted as social equals; people alive today remember signs posted in Toronto warning "riggers, Jews, and dogs" to keep off the beaches. But, the worst of the murderous persecution seemed to be over.

No longer banned from commerce, industrious Jews quickly became successful. But, antiSemitism had not gone away. During difficult economic times, Jews again became a convenient scapegoat. A stereotype of the crafty, hard-bargaining money lender became a familiar object of hate during the Depression. There were quotas in Canadian universities, that kept many Jews out of professional courses.

Back in Europe, life for Jews became very difficult after World War I. Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany, and his hatred of Jews was no secret. In his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler wrote that "Jewry is definitely a race and not a religious community, exclusively interested in money, material goods and the fulfillment of its lust for power." On 24 February 1920, all civil rights were abolished for Jews in Germany. Jews were deported by the thousands. Between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939, one million Jews fled Europe.

On 30 January 1942, Adolf Hitler promised that "the result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry once and for all." Trains filled with European Jews rolled across the countryside to the extermination camps. At the very moment the German army desperately needed every piece of rolling stock to move arms to the front line, the trains carrying Jews to the gas chambers received priority. Hitler's obsession with killing Jews helped him lose the war.

Two million children died in the Holocaust. Half were deliberately murdered; the rest died of starvation and disease. Medical experiments of unimaginable cruelty were performed without anesthetic. Tonnes of human hair was shipped to German factories to make blankets for soldiers. The fittest of the captives were forced to work making weapons and arms for Hitler's soldiers; the average life expectancy of such a slave was seven months.

Thousands and thousands of people were directly involved in the mass production of death that went on in places such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen. Hundreds of thousands more knew about what was happening behind the barbed-wire fences and did nothing.

A few people showed great courage, and some of them lost their lives, in trying to shelter Jews from the Nazis. One was Angelo Roncalli, who latter became Pope John XXVII. He issued thousands of Christian baptismal certificates to Jews and saved many as a result. Heroic stories surfaced after the war of others who hid Jews in their houses, or helped smuggle them into a safe haven.

But, then again, the Christian world at large ignored the stories that were coming out of Nazi=Germany about what was happening. For some, the tales of mass murder were too monstrously obscene to be believed. Others knew the truth and did nothing. All that remained of six million Jews was mass graves, ashes, and crushed bones.

Gerda Friedberg of Canada's Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre tries to keep the memory of those victims alive: "Looking at the sad and frightened faces of the photographs of children over and over again, I could hear their crying. I could feel their agony, their fear, the pain of separation. I could hear their screams as they were being tortured and beaten, until death came as a friend...The who]e world must know and never, never forget what happened."

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. One view of the Holocaust is that we should forgive and forget; another view is that we must constantly be reminded of what happened to ensure it isn't repeated. Discuss these apposing views.

2. Appoint a group of students to design a permanent memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.