“I go back inside the train; I carry out dead infants; I unload luggage. I touch corpses, but I cannot overcome the mounting, uncontrollable terror. I try to escape from the corpses, but they are everywhere: lined up on the gravel, on the cement edge of the ramp, inside the cattle cars. Babies, hideous naked women, men twisted by convulsions. I run off as far as I can go, but immediately a whip slashes across my back. Out of the corner of my eye I see an S.S. man, swearing profusely. I stagger forward and run, lose myself in the Canada group. Now, at last, I can once more rest against the stack of rails. The sun has leaned low over the horizon and illuminates the ramp with a reddish glow; the shadows of the trees have become elongated, ghostlike. In the silence that settles over nature at this time of day, the human cries seem to rise all the way to the sky.”Tadeusz Borowski, This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentleman
What happened to the Germans is one of nature’s wonders. They were considered among the most civilized nations, and all of a sudden, overnight, they became savages, the worst among the most primitive nations in history. Moreover, Hitler was elected by the majority’s vote.Baal Hasulam - The Solution
The Holocaust was maybe the greatest tragedy in the history of the world. When people see something so abhorrent, they can’t help but wonder how it was allowed to happen. There are both historical and psychological explanations that begin to scratch the surface of how such tragedy was possible, but no definitive answer. There is no clear answer as to why this became tolerable, but as Kabbalists know, it is the result of the disunity of the Jewish people and the general rise of the ego across the world. Germany had developed itself as far as it could on a corporeal level, before an Upper Force destroyed the nation and the only people left to blame were us, the Jews.With the wisdom of Kabbalah, the world is simplified. Everything is about the push and pull of the ego. With this knowledge we see The Holocaust not as a result of socioeconomic consequences and the will of Adolph Hitler, but as an inevitable event in the history of mankind. When Hitler took power in 1933, he alluded to the Jews and how they must be abdicated, logically uttering, “A nation must have no discord.” He saw man’s natural inclination towards hating Jews and exploited this inherent vice in all men. Something about Jews made them distrustful easy targets, and while many people were not actively anti-Semitic, the lunacy of Hitler’s claims about Jews had very little opposition. They quickly gained steam. If Jews were beloved this would not have been possible. It is easy to confuse this tragedy as the result of Hitler’s charisma and will, but we must remember even Hitler’s foes would not help us in 1938 when Hitler offered us to all the countries that participated in The League of Nations. Slowly, Hitler’s anti-Semitic allusions perverted scientific reasoning to build a theory about our people to prove we were not human.While “The Final Solution,” was not immediately advertised as a mission to extinguish the Jews, most of their Aryans slowly fell in line, beneath the veneer of ideology. The work camps were being built for The Jews to occupy and the Germans along with the Jews were blindsided when Jews all across Europe were forced to leave their homes to occupy them. These slave camps were built like legitimate factories to support the German war effort. While there may have been utterances that these factories were part of the solution to The Jewish Problem, it was not something openly spoken of. Jews were universally despised at this point, but like the camps themselves the thought of the atrocities were set aside from the landscape of German life.By 1939, all Jews in Germany were wearing Jewish stars and were to be enslaved for the war effort. Every single possession of these two million people was stolen and itemized, before leaving their middle class homes for the cesspool known as the ghettoes. The only reminder of these people were the millions of suitcases the Nazi army seized containing everything of value the Jews owned. There were fur coats, jewelry, gold watches, paintings, cufflinks made of teeth, furniture, books. All the signs of a sophisticated and powerful people. The Germans organized these valuable possessions and recorded their findings. The items were seized, recorded, used and sold.Everything about the Nazis was systematic and precise. Maybe it made killing their neighbors easier. Following detailed and specific orders could distract Nazis from the evil they were exercising. There was no time to look at the bigger picture. All that time devoted to following and executing orders left little time to process what they were doing. The stain of Judaism was disappearing one diamond ring at a time.The six million deaths that took place over three years is an imperceptible event. All of Europe was stained with the blood of our ancestors. In the words of Joseph Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The Holocaust was six million tragedies, a figure that overwhelms. As human beings we cannot comprehend the horror of this. We don’t know what six million people looks like, but when we see the indignities of a single camp—the bodies dropped haphazardly like rocks in a pile, we feel overwhelming disgust. The horror lives within all of us, but it is denied in our conscious comprehension of the world. We do not see the women and children being executed and separated from each other on a daily basis, because it would be too painful. Instead, the terror lives in our subconscious. The spirit of bloodshed is covered by the artifice of societies, hiding the spiritual world from our perception with our egos and wrong desires.What seems obvious logically, but no one chooses to infer from this event is that then entire world was tacitly agreeing with Hitler’s view of the Jews. We choose not to believe it, just as we choose not to face the horrors of The Holocaust on a daily basis. We deny that if there had been a single state willing to take on our highly educated, uncommonly successful population, The Holocaust would never have happened. If Jews were not despised it would be common sense for a suffering nation to take in a wealthy segment of the German population in times of grave economic turmoil. We were viewed as manipulative and less than human not just by Hitler, but the entire world. We were a defective race of selfish self-seekers who raped the lands we inhabited for ourselves and horded our wisdom for ourselves. There was no reason for us to exist in their disturbed worldview. And though it is hidden behind a veneer, people still feel this today. They see that the Jews do not fulfill their role in the correction of the world.Further, and perhaps even more alarming was that Hitler was completely inessential to The Holocaust. It was an inevitable cataclysm in Jewish history. Germany was inessential. It was the result of the way the world viewed Jews. They are inherently distrustful of Jews, because we were once united and do not share the method of unity that will cure the suffering of the world.If it had not happened in Germany it would have happened elsewhere, and it can happen again. In the world before globalization, our egos manifested themselves in nationalism. After our egos could no longer handle being subjugated to Kings, our inflated egos attached themselves to nations. No nation was able to accept Judaism, because we were viewed as a different species, somehow special and separate. Let us not forget that we are different. We are capable of shifting the landscape of the entire world. In the words of Leo Tolstoy, “The Jew is the symbol of eternity. ...He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.”[i] If the Jews were to unite above their differences, rather than just spread their Torah, they could end this cycle of suffering. In each and every generation we are tested. Let us hope in our lifetime we can unite the nation of Israel and lead the rest of the world by example. We will see religion as we know it today is inessential. All we will want is a stronger connection.We are the chosen people given the one essential truth to create a harmonious world, who for centuries have acknowledged our own suffering. Why do we allow it to continue as anti-Semitism blazes across the globe?[1] Leo Tolstoy, “What is the Jew?” quoted in The Final Resolution, p 189, printed in Jewish World periodical, 1908An author, screenwriter, and blogger for Huffington Post, Jesse Bogner is a 27-year-old graduate of Bard College with a BA in Creative Writing. Last year he moved from New York City, where he was born and raised, to study Kabbalah in Israel under Michael Laitman. His book, The Egotist , has been translated into three languages. He was recently filmed by Larry King's crew in Israel for the Spirituality Network. http://jessebogner.com