Diversity Macht Frei
January 29, 2016
Rudi Oppenheimer, who spent 15 months in Bergen-Belsen, has warned teenagers that the world “has not learned a thing yet” about the importance of offering a home to endangered refugees.
The testimony of Mr Oppenheimer to pupils of Pimlico Academy in Westminster was live-streamed to more than 200 schools on Wednesday morning. Students from England, Scotland and as far afield as Sweden sent questions to the survivor, whose family fled Berlin for Holland in 1936, only to be captured and transported to Westerbork transit camp in 1943.
Mr Oppenheimer, 84, said the HMD Q&A was the 1,596th time he had addressed a school group. Comparing the current refugees to the Jews who tried to escape Nazi atrocities, he pointed out: “We have problems in Darfur, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, you name them. There are plenty of people who want to leave their country and can leave their country but no one wants them.”
… He told a questioner who asked what he thought about movies based on the Holocaust: “They’re not accurate, but I love them. It gets youngsters interested in the Holocaust.”
Holocaust survivor Ruth Klueger on Wednesday lauded Germany for keeping its doors open to thousands of war refugees, calling Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “we can do it” slogan “heroic”.
“This country, which was responsible for the worst crimes of the century, has won the applause of the world today,” the 84-year-old scholar told the German parliament in an address as part of commemorations for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“I am one of the many outsiders who has gone from surprise to admiration,” Klueger said, describing Merkel’s rallying call of “We can do it” as a “simple but heroic slogan”.
In an op-ed piece written for Newsweek on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Anne Frank, likened Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler.
Schloss was a childhood friend of Anne Frank and after the war, her mother, Fritzi, married Frank’s father Otto. The plight of the asylum-seekers resonated with Schloss as she recounted the alienation and isolation she and her family experienced upon immigrating to Belgium shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938.
Schloss criticized Trump for fomenting hatred and intolerance in statements he made regarding asylum-seekers: “If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the US it would be a complete disaster. I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
Additionally, she drew comparisons between the tepid international response to the refugee crisis and that of Nazi Germany, even asserting that the current situation is more tenuous as the allies “worked together to combat the terrible threat of Nazism.”
She argued that if Germany has successfully taken in over a million refugees to date, then it is the moral responsibility of larger nations such as Canada and the US to do so as well.