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The courage to remember a traumatic past
Monday, 10 November 2003, 20:30 IST
With this message the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre has been touring various parts of the globe, exhibiting images from the Holocaust to make people aware of the bloody past and possibilities of it repeating itself.
The widely acclaimed centre has finally come to India with a similar exhibition that opened in the Indian capital Monday. The two-week-long exhibition displays some captivating pictures from the systematic genocide of European Jews by the Nazis.
"India is one of the few civilizations where Jews were not persecuted and thus it's a matter of great joy to bring the exhibition here," said Abraham Cooper, associate dean in the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
"There is a lot of positive feeling here but unfortunately we know very little of this country. Hence, we decided to make a trip to this special place of friendship and peace."
Titled "The Courage to Remember", the organisers said the exhibition is both a tribute and a warning to the world.
"A tribute to the six million Jews and millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 and a warning that the root causes of the Holocaust persist," said Alfred Balitzer of the centre.
Balitzer, an adviser with the centre for the last 20 years, said, "If you remember the history, the same dangers might not be repeated."
The exhibition relives the inhuman and barbaric acts intended to wipe out an entire people.
Teenagers pulling around cargo, emaciated men and women stripped before being shot in the back of the head and thrown into shallow graves.
The exhibits capture images from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland to the carnage wreaked by the Nazi mobile killing squads called "Einsatzagruppen".
Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Holocaust, started the centre in 1977. An architect by training, he lost around 80 relatives in the genocide.
Known as the 'Nazi hunter', Wiesenthal slipped into groups of Nazi murderers to bring them to book. His maxim: "Every trial would be an antidote to hatred".
The centre's first exhibition outside the U.S. was in Japan in 1988. Since then the exhibition has travelled to every continent. Organisers recall that around three million Japanese visited the exhibition.
"Japanese knew very little of the Holocaust but still there was so much anti-Semitic literature on the Tokyo streets," recalled Cooper.
"But then young Japanese boys and girls started coming to us to clear their curiosity. That was a great feeling."
Balitzer said educating young people of the past, the dangers that lay ahead, and of tolerance was the most important objective of the centre.
"The world is moved by those who shout the loudest," he stressed.
Source: IANS
Source: IANS
