THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

German businessman Oskar Schindler, who succeeds in saving severalthousand Jews from death in concentration camps. When Schindlerdiscovers that his closest worker, who is privy to all his secrets, isabout to be sent to a concentration camp, he tries to encourage him:Schindler: I will see to it that you receive special treatment if you are sent toAuschwitz.Worker: I hope that by “special treatment” you don’t mean what people say.Schindler: Do we need a new language?Worker: I am afraid so, Mr. Schindler. 4Many books and studies have been written about the Nazi reinterpretation of words,and the direct and indirect methods of brainwashing the German people. There arenot many German documents that specifically use the words “destruction,”“elimination,” “murder,” or “killing.” The destruction process is described as“evacuation,” “special treatment,” “relocation,” “work in the East,” “residentialrelocation,” and “final solution.” This special terminology was developed to allay thefears of Jews so that they would go easily to the centers of death, believing theywere going to work in the East. The destination was a “labor camp,” because theword “camp” denotes a temporary stay, definitely not anything definitive (we, too,have yet to overcome this, since we still call the Nazi death centers “concentrationcamps”). Even when the victims arrived at Auschwitz they remained optimistic, sinceabove the gate was the slogan “Work Makes You Free.” Then there were the“showers” for them to cleanse and disinfect themselves after the long journey. Whowould believe that they meant something else entirely? What was Zyklon B gas?Humans always believe words. Frantz Fanon wrote in the early 1950s. “To speakmeans to use a certain syntax, to have the morphology of a certain language. But thetrue meaning is to assume a certain culture, a load of civilization.” 5 A civilization thatemploys laundered words uses a false language to represent a false culture and allowsa state to wash itself clean of any responsibility for acts done in their name. “I didn’tknow,” “I wasn’t told,” “It can’t be, the newspapers didn’t report it” are commonmanifestations of responses to laundered language. The reply should be, “They didtell you, but in words that allowed you to not acknowledge their true meaning. Theytold you, but in a way that enabled you to not know what you did not want to know.”