I spoke over the weekend with a
94-year old woman, who just happens to be my Godmother, Elizabeth. She had just attended the funeral back
in Boston (where I grew up) of a woman that she had known for 91 years – her
97-year old friend, Jeanne. Both
Elizabeth and Jeanne’s families were wiped out in the Austria of the late
1930’s by the Nazi onslaught.
Elizabeth and her husband, Richard, had made it out by the skin of their
teeth. Richard was an anti-Nazi
activist, and the Gestapo was literally knocking on doors on his street when he
led his young wife-to-be, Elizabeth, on a wild journey to America, landing in
Portland, Maine in 1939, and making their way to Boston. My parents were their first American
friends.
At the end of last week, Iran’s
recently, dubiously re-elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, renewed his
Holocaust denials, once again exhorting an annual anti-Israel rally for
Jerusalem Day, also known as Quds Day, that the Holocaust was a myth, a pretext
for creating the state of Israel. Ahmadinejad,
looking his usual, drowned-rat self, gave a fiery and absurd speech, wrapping
with his usual slogans: ""Death to America, Death to Israel."
Nearby, crowds swelled in protest
against the recent, obviously rigged, election results, and assuring years more
of Ahmadinejad’s nonsensical and inflammatory utterances. When government agents in the crowd
yelled: "Death to Israel," the angry protesters shouted back, "Death to
Russia," expressing their intense displeasure that Russia had accepted Iran’s
absurd election results without question.
When Ahmadinejad began his speech,
observers reported cries of "Resign, Resign," from the crowd. Resplendent in that zip-up,
golf-jacket-looking thing he always wears (which would be overpriced, if you
passed it on the rack at Wal-Mart, marked $29.95), Ahmadinejad said it was a
"national and religious duty" of Iranians to confront Israel. He called the Holocaust "a lie," saying
it was used as a pretext for Israel’s creation in 1948; by calling the
Holocaust a "lie," Ahmadinejad crossed a semantic line that even he had not ventured to cross in several
years of such past, outrageous, statements.
It is beyond incredible that, here
in the 21st Century, a supposedly elected leader of a nation of
nearly 66 million people, can actually make such an assertion – one that Ahmadinejad
had seemed to be backing away from, prior to his dubious re-election, but, he
sang his old song with both guns blazing again in the Quds Day speech.
I grew up listening to my
Godmother, Elizabeth’s, stories about what her life was like growing up in
Austria before the Nazi’s. Her
father was a highly educated and respected man (before the Nazi’s turned their
world upside down). He was an
early Zionist whose writings and support of Theodore Hertzel (considered by
some as the Father of modern Zionism), helped ultimately give birth to the state
of Israel after the horrors of the Holocaust, which claimed some 6 million
Jewish lives and WWII, which historians estimate claimed some 50 to 70 million
human souls in total. Elizabeth
and Richard’s harrowing escape from the Gestapo and their journey to make a new
life in America in 1939, were stories that I heard over and over while growing
up, and I could not get enough of their telling and re-telling.
The "Big Lie" is propaganda technique coined by none other than Adolf Hitler,
himself, in his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf – meaning, a lie that is so enormous that nobody could possibly
believe that anybody "could have the impudence to distort the truth so
infamously." Repeating a lie
often enough makes some believe it to be true; this is particularly pernicious
where people do not take the time to study and become familiar with history.
It is well that there are still
people like Elizabeth, who at 94, has a mind as sharp as a tack, when there are
people like Ahmadinejad, making the kind of irresponsible, malicious and
outrageous statements that he made in the Quds Day speech. When there are no more survivors alive
from that unspeakably horrible period in world history, the Ahmadinejads, and
all the other tin-horn dictators and hate-mongers of this world, will have the
world’s stage all to themselves. Ahmadinejad
and my Godmother, Elizabeth, are both excellent reminders – we will continue to
need reminding.