Michael Cernea: Ecou la articolul Asteptând dezvelirea monumentului Holocaustului din Cluj

Dear Mike,

I just read your article about the Monument to the Holocaust Victims of Cluj, to be unveiled in May 2014 in Romania, in the very city in which those 18,000 Jews lived, from which they were deported by the Nazis and by the Horthy fascist regime authorities which then occupied and controlled the city. They sent away those 18,000, elderly, adults and children, to gas chambers and to  killing fields, part of a larger crime that should be remembered in infamy. Such horrible mass murders ought to never be forgotten. I am profoundly moved by what you wrote, and also —  by what this monument signifies today. 


These atrocious facts and criminal deeds, the true history of what happened in Cluj and in many other towns and communities, are still insufficiently known even after 70 years. This is why the Cluj Monument dedicated to the victims’ memory, and articles like yours, are important, necessary, and highly meaningful. Your comments, and the personal recollections from your own youth as son of Holocaust survivors, are an additional testimony. I thank you for your writing them out. I know first hand what such mass killings meant and how they unfolded, as my family 
and I were swept in the big Iasi pogrom of June 1941, when over 10,000 Jews were killed by machine guns and in death trains. I wasn’t then even ten years old when we were arrested and came within a step of being executed on  the street, while dead bodies were already lying all around.
  
I join you in the tribute your article offers to today’s population of Cluj, and to the Cluj municipality. Erecting this monument in Cluj is a clear and powerful statement, written in stone. I see it as a collective  call to keeping this painful memory from fading, maintain it alive today, and convey it to future generations. For this memory should endure.  Memory and culture help prevent the repetition of past social crimes, advocated in new languages. Incitement industries and hate-sowing educational systems continue to exist and to spew venom. Stopping today’s hate perpetrators calls for  denouncing both their acts and their toxic theories. Fighting them remains a moral, political, and intellectual commandment today, as genocidal killings take place nowadays too, in other places. 
 
I urge you, dear Mike, to translate your article and publish it in  English too, so that many, indeed many more people read it, support it,  and share in your testimony and major message.
 

 
 

 

 

Opiniile exprimate în textele publicate  nu reprezintă punctele de vedere ale editorilor, redactorilor sau ale membrilor colegiului redacţional. Autorii îşi asumă întreaga răspundere pentru conţinutul articolelor.

Comentariile cititorilor sunt moderate de către redacţie. Textele indecente şi atacurile la persoană se elimină. Revista Baabel este deschisă faţă de orice discuţie bazată pe principii şi schimbul de idei.

 

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