That was the comment made by Brig. Gen. Amir Eshel when he arrived in Poland last week together with a contingent of 140 IDF and Air Force personnel to take part in the celebrations to make the 85th anniversary of Polands air force.
Part of the Israeli contingent's itinerary was a fly-over by 3 IAF F-15s, the most powerful and modern plane in Israel's arsenal, over the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp. It was to this that Eshel was alluding.
In response to the fly-over, the Auschwitz museum condemned it as "inappropriate". Israeli Ambassador to Poland, Shevach Weiss, was asked why Israel was disturbing the quiet of the place. But the museum and the questioners missed the entire point of the fly-over, and I gather they also miss much of the point of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust carried out by the Nazis and their allies throughout Europe was the culmination of thousands of years of anti-Semitic hatred, pogroms, and massacres aimed at the Jews for simply being Jewish. Those thousands of years saw tens of millions of Jews slaughtered throughout Europe and other parts of the world. When taken together, the Holocaust was simply the last and largest and most horrific pogrom. If the Holocaust had not been carried out as part of a larger war, it is doubtful the rest of the world would even have noticed -- just as the world barely batted an eyelash at the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 or the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.
The State of Israel, born as it was out of the ashes of the Holocaust, serves many purposes for the Jewish nation. But chief among these must be the maintenance of Jewish power and sovereignty as the only guarantor of "Never Again". The birth of Israel meant that the world would never again able to launch massive pogroms against the Jewish nation anywhere in the world.
"This quiet is the silence that was forced upon us," Ambassador Weiss responded to his questioners. "This quiet could be disturbed by a screech. This screech is the shout of the children and grandchildren of those whose ashes are at Auschwitz."
Yesterday's IAF fly-over at Auschwitz, like so many other symbols in Jewish history, releases a whole wave of conflicting emotions. There is pride that the IAF is now so powerful that its planes -- leading the world in technological advancement -- can fly over such sacred and sorrowful territory. There is remembrance, in that the three pilots involved are all first or second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. There is pain at the memory of those who can only look up from their nameless mass graves below. And there is anguish that, as Eshel put it, "We arrived 60 years too late." This is the "shout" that Weiss referred to.
Other air forces flew over Auschwitz during the war, but none were able to show the power and historical responsibility that the IAF did yesterday. None were able to take Auschwitz out of commission and save the millions of Jews who were murdered there. Had it existed at the time, the IAF could have ended the Holocaust before it became nearly as bad as it was.
Or could it?
We are now 60 years later. We have our own state, our own army, our own air force, and our own sense of history and justice. But in the last 35 months, 857 people have been murdered in the largest pogrom in Israeli history. Busses are blown up, restaurants are bombed, shopping malls are destroyed, drive-by shootings and mortar launchings are daily occurrences. And through it all, the response of Israel is half-hearted and restrained. These lives are not as important as political vision, foreign relationships or the will of other government.
The mythology of the State of Israel is that it is the only guarantor against future Holocausts. We can now shout over the silence that was left by Auschwitz. But the reality is that with more pogroms going on right in our own State, our leadership has lost sight of that single over-riding purpose for the State.
The Arabs who are launching these pogroms, taking part in them, supporting them, and cheering them on, view the wholesale murder of Jews much the same way the Nazis and their allies did. Jews, according to their worldview, were created to be murdered. They view themselves as the torchbearers of history, the next in-line in the millennia-old tradition of slaughtering Jews. They use the same texts, the same lies, the same innuendo, and the same tactics. Today's bus in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv is last generation's freight train on the tracks to Auschwitz or last century's Cossack hoards on horseback.
As the jets soared over Auschwitz at 300 knots, Eshel read out a prepared statement broadcast on the ground: "We pilots of the air force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their courage, and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation Israel."
Brig. Gen. Amir Eshel is able to lament today that we arrived too late to save the victims of Auschwitz. It is very important for all Israelis to keep that perspective as one of the guiding influences in the development of this State. We must continue the shout that Weiss spoke of. We must be the shield that Eshel promised, and we must defend the Jewish nation and state from any present or future pogroms or Holocausts. The alternative, which we are already beginning to see, is that years from now, some other general will make the same lament about us.
Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
