History lesson every January 27

Since 2005, we are celebrating today, January 27th, the International Day of Remembrance in Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust.

The UN General Assembly has set this date to urge member states to remember this historic chapter to prevent new genocides.

The internationally-named Holocaust, and Shoá Hebrew, has no comparison. It involved the systematic planning and execution of a plan to exterminate a people from the face of the earth by the German Nazi regime and its allies during the Second World War, and had managed to destroy a third of the Jews. Specifically, six million people, including one and a half million children. The scale of the damage is such that today, 74 years after the end of the war, the Jews of 2019 were able, demographically, to reach the same level as before the beginning of the conflict. .

The date was not whimsical.

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army "liberated" the branch that hell allowed in the country called Auschwitz and what the soldiers saw was indisputable. What until then had been silenced could no longer be kept secret. The world has seen that man could be the worst enemy of man, capable of limitless cruelty known since his existence in this world. But it would seem that the same human being who caused so much damage can not coexist with this fact.

Hitler, a few hours before his suicide, predicted that hatred of the Jews would take centuries to recover. He is mistaken. And a lot.

Years later, despite the long and abundant documentation produced by the effective Nazi bureaucrats themselves, voices began to emerge to deny the existence of the Holocaust or to relativize it.

Then began to appear those who spoke of the existence of a "holocuento", to realize the compbadion of the world and obtain the creation of the state of Israel.

And more recently, those who not only compare the existence of this state to the Nazi regime without measuring its destruction. Or the trivialization of the Holocaust, describing as Nazi anyone who does not share his opinion.

All this without mentioning that there are states that advocate as national policy the denial of the Holocaust and the destruction of the state of Israel. Something like denying what happened, repeating it and having the context to deny it in the future.

Nor can we ignore the presence of anti-Semitic acts in Europe and the United States. Without covering the eyes, there is also a Creole presence in the electoral offer and in the media. This date is only useful if we understand that the evil has prospered because the good ones did not do anything. If we do not take it as a day to bring flowers to the graves as souvenirs, we badyze what we can do to value each life.

This day has no value if, when talking about what afflicts, the interlocutor does not try to understand what a man is suffering.

We do not take advantage of the commemoration if we enter into a Manichean interpretation of reality, because if we devalue the opinion of the other, sooner or later, we devalue his right to exist. To continue to share the spaceship called Earth, we can not adopt a vision of ourselves or of them.

Every January 27 should be used to internalize the idea that difference enriches us. Seeing and listening to others makes us better. That a company is not made up of thousands of people who repeat one voice but thousands of different voices who agree to live together and respect the identity of the other.

Still echoing in my ears is Cicero's phrase that a Latin teacher taught us by heart the first day of high school: History vero testis tempore light of truth, the life of memory, teacher of life, messenger of the 39; antiquity.

If we do not want to learn from it or if we simply want to adopt a unique interpretation, if history does not teach us to value life, we have only the opposite, pain, death and desolation.

* Representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Latin America.