German Bundestag remembers Holocaust victims, Turkey broadcasts "Shoah"
Today, on the occasion of the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz, the German Bundestag commemorated the victims of the Holocaust. The main speaker at this year’s memorial was Germany’s most famous literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who is of Polish Jewish origin.
The President of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, reminded those assembled that a series of murders committed by neo-Nazis throughout the country had been discovered last fall and said such hatred and violence cannot be accepted. Lammert also pointed out that according to the most recent research, 20 % of Germans are latent anti-Semites. “Especially in Germany, 20 % is too much,” Lammert said.
In his speech, Reich-Ranicki commemorated the deportation of Jewish people from the Warsaw ghetto to the death camp of Treblinka in the summer of 1942. “The displacement from Warsaw had a single aim, a single objective: Death,” the 91-year-old Holocaust survivor said.
Reich-Ranicki was born in 1920 in Poland and attended school in Berlin. In 1938, like thousands of other Polish Jews, he was deported to Poland and imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. In 1942 he married his wife there. She passed away just last year. Both managed to flee the ghetto in 1943. In 1958 they moved from Poland to West Germany.
Today the entire world is commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Wire services have mainly been reporting on the exceptional action taken by Turkey’s public television station, TRT, which broadcast the French documentary fim “Shoah”, which is more than nine hours long, in its entirety yesterday. The film’s director, Claude Lanzmann, said it was the first time the film had been broadcast by a state television station in a Muslim country. The documentary, which is probably the most famous film ever made about the Holocaust, was broadcast in Turkey as part of a campaign to increase understanding between Jews and Muslims and against Holocaust denial.
