No one is ashamed?

The indifference of governments and societies towards the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza for the past two and a half years, ongoing despite being less visible due to the new war fronts opened in Lebanon and Iran by the US-Israel duo and their allies, is often resented as something unprecedented, especially when we think of the German Nazi genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Subjected to decades of propaganda and disinformation, public opinion has integrated a narrative according to which the genocide of six million Jews was, from the very beginning, combated by Western societies and their leaders. Witnessing today on our cell phone screens a genocide executed with the greatest refinements of sadism by the Israeli army, we have become accustomed to thinking that the indifference of consumer societies is something unprecedented. It wasn’t like that with the European Jews, we believe.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Inhumanity has always been part of humanity. Just like heroism and the non-negotiable attachment to dignity, contrary to what is commonly thought in the capitalist bubble, where the foolish conviction reigns that “every man has a price”.

Today’s societies and their political leaders repeat what their grandparents did. They look the other way while thousands of human beings are exterminated in festivals of cruelty, whether they are children, women, or the elderly. Those who do not conform are always a minority. Or those who, to protest against the indifference and inaction of the world, renounce their own lives in a final gesture of solidarity with the innocent victims, like Aaron Bushnell.

We live submerged in myths, inhabitants of Plato’s cave. Six million Jews, 250,000 Roma, hundreds of thousands of disabled people, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians were exterminated by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators. In Poland alone, the Germans killed between 5.6 and over 6 million citizens, approximately 17% of the population, of whom about 3 million were Polish Jews. This, because the Western powers looked the other way. Or more precisely, they refused to act.

In December 1939, Szmul Mordechaj Zygielbojm, a Jewish Bund trade-union activist, managed to escape German-occupied Poland with the mission of alerting European leaders to the extermination of Polish Jews and requesting military action to stop the genocide. Faced with indifference and feeling powerless, he committed suicide on 12 May 1943 in London, when the last fighters were being murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Szmul Zygielbojm left three farewell letters addressed to his brother Fajwel, to fellow Bund members in the United States, and to Polish president Władysław Raczkiewicz and prime minister Władysław Sikorski.

He left words for his brother that echo from the abyss of anguish and helplessness in which he found himself. “The sky is cold and silent like the people down below… Indifferent to our tragedy, each night they go to sleep in their warm beds. It slashes my heart and mind like a sword. Their life in agony, their death is a disgrace for everyone in this world, and no one is ashamed?”

In the letter to the President and Prime Minister of Poland, Zygielbojm wrote: “I can neither be silent nor live when the last remnants of the Jewish people, whose I represent, are being killed. My comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto have fallen with guns in their hands, in their last heroic struggle. I wasn’t given the chance to die like them, together with them. But I belong with them, in their mass graves. Through my death, I wish to express my deepest protest against inaction with which the world is watching and permitting the destruction of the Jewish people. I am aware how little human life means, especially now. But since I couldn’t achieve it in my lifetime, perhaps my death will shake from lethargy those who can and who should act now, in order to save, in the last possible moment, this handful of Polish Jews who still remain alive.”