A Letter to My Seventeen Year Old Daughter at Auschwitz

Dear Leora,

As I write this letter to you today, you and your schoolmates visit the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkanau in Poland.

At this moment, you view the remains of the crematoria, the ovens, the inmate blocs, and the train tracks that took millions of our people to their murder.

You are witness to evil incarnate.

Why and how such evil can occur will now rack your brain.

That evil does not escape us.

Ever.

We all know that Germany was defeated in WW II.

However, Nazism was not defeated in 1945.

The idea that Jews can be murdered, because they are Jews, remains.

The idea of wiping out the Jews in World War II was promoted by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El Husseini, who hosted Adolf Eichmann in 1936 in Jerusalem.

The Mufti made Eichman understand that Hitler’s mission would not be complete if he only persecuted the Jews, as in generations before.

The Mufti feared that if millions of Jews survived, they would then move to Palestine and pioneer a Jewish state.

So the Mufti worked with Eichmann on the idea of “Jihad”, to launch a holy war of total destruction, so that Jews would have no escape from Europe.

Yet the Mufti was allowed to escape, even though he lived with Hitler in his bunker, and the Mufti was allowed to continue the Nazi legacy in Palestine.

And when Eichmann was brought to trial in the new state of Israel, Golda Meir, the foreign minister of Israel, asked that the Mufti also be brought to trial for the crime of genocide.

That did not happen.

Instead, the Mufti nurtured students: Yassir Arafat and Machmud Abbas, and taught them what he had instructed Eicahman: To kill the Jews in phases, one stage at a time, in one area at a time, so that no Jew would ever wake up to the reality that they really meant to carry out a “final solution”.

And how did the Nazis get away with that crime and how do the Mufti’s students seem to get away with their crimes?

Their method: Instill apathy in Jews whose own families are not yet being killed to believe that they are not targets of hatred and that they are not targets of murder.

The lesson: to listen to the message of our enemies.

And never to be apathetic when fellow Jews suffer.

Their suffering is our hurt.

Leora, this summer, as in previous summers, you work as a counselor with children whose parents or siblings were murdered by Arab terrorists.

And when you work with them, you understood that the PLO bullets and the PLO bombs were meant for any Jew.

This is the evil incarnate that we Jews face today, from the ovens of Auschwitz to the faces of children orphaned by the PLO.

They kill Jews for one reason: Because they are Jews.

That is The Nazi legacy that we live with.

That is the reality that we cope with.

No matter how difficult it is, our answer is to continue our lives as Jews, which is the ultimate challenge answer to the Nazi legacy that lingers.

We look forward to welcoming you home at Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in a few days.

From Evil Incarnate to Hope Everlasting.

Love,

Abba