When the Holocaust is not a Rock Star… (I)

by Laura Lai/ Essay

When the Holocaust is not a rock star only 45 percent of the Americans can name one concentration camp, and across Europe half of those more than 7,000 interviewed people in a public opinion poll (from Sept. 2018, with more than 1,000 respondents from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden) answered that they know a fair amount about the Holocaust. In France, for example, 20 percent of youngsters aged 18 to 34 has never heard of it; 12 percent of the young Austrians did not hear of it, and 4 out of 10 Austrian adults have never heard of it. In general, 1 in 20 Europeans have never heard of the Holocaust and one in twenty adults in Great Britain do not believe that Holocaust actually happened. What is the Holocaust? How can genocides be prevented?

            The Holocaust was genocide. Etymologically this word is made of two Greek words: holos, which means ‘complete’, and kaustos, which means ‘burned’. It seems that the word ‘genocide’ itself – defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.’ – did not exist before the Holocaust. This word was first formulated in 1944 by a Polish (of Jewish origin) Lawyer, Raphael Lemkin (1900 – 1959). He combined the Greek word geno (meaning ‘race’ or ‘tribe’) with the Latin word cide (meaning ‘killing’). The Holocaust was a mass genocide during the Second World War, targeting the European Jewish population with the precise purpose of annihilation: Until the end of the war it is said that 2/3 of the European Jewish population was annihilated, meaning around 6 million people.

            Nowadays, almost 76 years after the end of the Second World War, 50 percent of the respondents could say how many Jewish victims were, and 8 percent consider the number as being exaggerated. It also means that 8 percent cannot believe that people are capable of such a mass murder against other people.

Within this ignorance framework genocide happened again. It happened in Asia (Cambodia) in the '70s and it had 1,7 million victims. It happened again in Europe, in ex – Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995 targeting the Muslim population of Bosnia – Herzegovina and it was called ‘ethnic cleansing’. It happened in Africa (Rwanda) in 1994, when in three months – from April to July – 500,000 Tutsi minority were killed by the majority and ruling Hutus. North and South Sudan civil war and Darfur are other examples of genocide usually called ‘mass slaughter’, and the list of examples from across the world can, unfortunately, go on. Recent events in Sudan’s capital Khartoum brought again an alarming number of victims.