“It was horrifying when I saw those images of police putting numbers on people’s arms,” said Robert Frolich, the chief rabbi of Hungary. “It reminded me of Auschwitz. And then putting people on a train with armed guards to take them to a camp where they are closed in? Of course there are echoes of the Holocaust.”
… But perhaps not since the Jews were rounded up by Nazi Germany have there been as many images coming out of Europe of people locked into trains, babies handed over barbed wire, men in military gear herding large crowds of bedraggled men, women and children.
At the same time, the images may reveal a deeper truth about Europe and its seeming unpreparedness for a crisis so long in the making: While extolling the virtues of human rights and humanism, it remains, in many parts, a place resistant to immigration and diversity.
As a result, some here are reacting in ways that recall some of the Continent’s darkest impulses. “They must be oblivious because who would do that if they had any historical memory whatsoever,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
“It’s amazing, really. Certainly those images of the trains can’t help but conjure up nightmares of the Holocaust.” Rabbi Frolich was especially struck by the lies used to manipulate the migrants. “They tell them that the train was going to Austria and then take them to a camp instead,” the rabbi said. “I don’t think the police got instructions from the government to do it this way, but it is very similar to what happened to Jews in the 1940s.”
Jan Munk, chairman of the Jewish Community of Prague, was inclined to be generous in his interpretation of the episode. “I understand the reasons why the police marked migrants with numbers,” he said. “They are under a lot of pressure and stress and simply did not realize the connotations it would have. It was indeed tasteless and reminded me of the numbers at Auschwitz, but I know it was not done on purpose.”
But for others, the fact that it was not done on purpose was even more frightening, showing a puzzling historical disconnect in many of the very places that the Holocaust caused the deepest devastation.
“It may be correct that they didn’t know, but the insensitivity and the ignorance of the imagery their actions evoked is stunning; it’s just sickening,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in New York.
Every time a European tries to defend his country against immvasion, there is a Jew waiting to hit him over the head with the Hitler stick. That’s how it has been throughout all these decades in which the immvasion has been taking place. That’s how it still is. The place that Adolf Hitler enjoys in our collective consciousness is vastly out of proportion to anything he actually did. Stalin killed more people. Mao killed more people. But they do not loom in our minds as icons of demonic evil in the way that Hitler does. It is Jews who have worked assiduously to build up this “Cult of Hitler” because it yields them political pay-offs. And it is this obsession with Hitler that derationalises much of our political debate and deranges our ruling class.