Holocaust 70 years on: Parliament warns against xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism

Approximately 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust: more than one million people alone were killed at Auschwitz in Poland during World War II.

Tomorrow, 27 January, the world marks 70 years since soldiers stormed the Auschwitz camp liberating survivors.

But while the world looks back expressing horror at the way human beings were killed for what was considered as differences, Foreign Affairs Minister George Vella and shadow minister Tonio Fenech questioned how much did the world learn from those atrocities.

Addressing parliament, Vella said that Hitler came to power in a democracy, highlighting the importance of respecting freedoms and rights. “We have to reflect on what created dictatorships, with people bowing their hands to everything those above them say. We must reflect on the ugliness of absolute power and the dangers of a society that adopted racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism,” Vella said.

The foreign affairs minister insisted that those guilty of atrocities were not robots or animals, but human beings who were able to carry out these horrors without blinking an eye.

“Years ago people used to be marked. Today we have ethnic cleansing. I ask myself whether we have truly learnt from our past. I highly doubt it. Perhaps today we don’t have the same numbers but around the world we still experience killings, attacks and deaths.”

Vella said society had the duty to teach its children of the carnage and killings that went on, to serve as a reminder to what the human being was capable of.

Echoing Vella’s comments, shadow foreign affairs minister Tonio Fenech said the Nazi machinery had been dedicated to eradicating millions of people it deemed undesirable to form part of its ‘Aryan’ race: Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, and people with physical or mental disabilities.

“And today we still see around us people killed because of their beliefs, their religion, their sexual identity. Persons who are persecuted and their rights denied. When today we look back at the Nazi regime and analyse what forced a country with all the structures in place to commit such horrors, we realise that all sentiments are still with us today: leaders who cement fear in their people.”

Fenech said xenophobia and racism were increasingly rearing their ugly heads across Europe.

Arguing that the holocaust that should have ended 70 years ago was still with us today, Fenech said people still feared each other because of their differences – fears that leaders fed on to control the people.

“We still fear each other because of our difference: a bomb is planted to kill journalist; a war is organised to take over a territory; torture to control minds and communities.”

Fenech said media pictures of the recent arrival of 87 migrants were not far off from pictures taken during the Holocaust: “It is the same picture of persons losing their dignity and rights simply because they didn’t agree with their government’s ideology or religion, forced to flee as victims of the world they live in.”