Today it is sixty years ago that Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces and many survivors and dignitaries from all over the world gathered for a ceremony at the site that once housed the infamous concentration camp. There’s very little that I can add today that others haven’t already said and I recommend you to check out Norman Geras who has dedicated all of his posts today to this tragedy and to the IsraPundit with reflections, comments and links.

Still, I want to say something. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the lessons of the Holocaust are slowly but steadily evaporating. Despite all the guilt and compassion professed by European nations after the Second World War – notably by my ancestral grounds with their abysmal record in this matter – they failed miserably when real cases of genocide manifested themselves, in particular during the mass slaughter that took place in the former Yugoslavia only ten years ago. The latter was a failed test and it was followed by resurgent anti-Semitism and very depressing statistics that younger generations had become increasingly unaware of the horrors fascism had inflicted upon humanity. It’s questionable if we will ever see an exact repeat of the holocaust and its final solution, but the evidence since 1945 points to the coninued omnipresence of inflicting mass suffering on one particular group of people in order to further political agendas and solidify the authority that some evil dogmas have been able to acquire.

Let’s do all we can to remember Auschwitz and the many other human tragedies in which complete innocents perished en masse, but let’s not delude ourselves that by remembering we will prevent them from ever happening again. They will come back in many different guises. Not only do we need to fight them, we need to emulate those that lived to tell the story of Auschwitz: survive and preserve humanity.