The Silent Sound of Tears: A Reflection on the Holocaust

The Silent Sound of Tears: A Reflection on the Holocaust January 27, 2015

Seventy years ago today, Allied Forces liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, known as the “death factory.”  On this day, we remember the victims and we search our hearts:  How could this inhmanity have happened in the modern world?

Professor Robert P. George of Princeton offered some sober insights in an essay on the subject.  “The Holocaust,” he wrote,

“…did not begin with the mass killing of Jews or other ethnic or religious minorities, or even Hitler’s political opponents. It began with the killing of the handicapped and infirm. They were, according to Nazi ideology, “useless eaters,” “parasites,” lebensunwertes leben (“lives unworthy of life”). It is important to remember that this eugenic doctrine did not originate with the Nazis. It began with polite, urbane, well-educated, sophisticated people who saw “social hygiene” via, among other methods, euthanasia, as representing progress and modernity. They wanted to ditch the old Judaeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of all human life with what they regarded as a more advanced and rational philosophy. This was the view articulated by, for example, noted legal scholar Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in their treatise *Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life*, published in 1920. Binding and Hoche were not Nazis, and when they were writing their book the Nazi party didn’t even exist. In a few years, however, Hitler and the Nazis would adopt their ideas about “social hygiene” and carry out the euthanasia program with a remorseless, pitiless fervor. Thus, what became the Shoah—the killing of six million Jews, two to three million Russians, two million ethnic Poles, and many, many others—began.

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In 2014, Pope Francis hand wrote a letter to his good friend, Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Buenos Aires, marking Holocaust Memorial Day.

In Rome, the January 27 memorial was marked by a concert entitled “Violins of Hope”.

In his letter, Pope Francis called the Holocaust “a horror and a disgrace to humanity” that must never be repeated.  The letter was read aloud at the evening concert, which featured works by Barber, Vivaldi and Beethoven.  But behind the sound of music, Pope Francis wrote, the heart of each of those present will be able to make out the silent sound of tears.

Israeli violin maker Amnon Weinstein had discovered and restored twelve violins which somehow avoided destruction during the Holocaust, including one which was thrown from a train en route to Auschwitz and another which accompanied the Jewish deportees to Auschwitz’ gas chambers.  Tonight, these twelve violins will be played together.

The Holocaust victims’ violins were played together last year, in a concert at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, featuring the Philharmonic Orchestra of Monte-Carlo.  At that concert (so perhaps at the Rome concert as well), biographies of musicians who lived through the Holocaust were told.  The surviving musicians included Alma Rose, conductor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra and niece to the composer Gustav Mahler, as well as Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein, Jewish musicians who continued to compose and play until their deaths in the Nazis’ gas chambers.

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Today, as we remember the great shame that was the Holocaust, let us pray that it will never happen again.


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