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Warning for all generations

“We were loaded in cattle wagons and sent to Poland, in the place Birkenau. Those capable for work were separated, and the others were put in separate rooms. Nobody knew what to expect. After a while, I sat next to a furnace to read something, on the light of what was burning inside. I couldn’t have imagined that right at that moment the flame that was giving me the light to read was coming from the bodies of my unfortunate children, who were being burnt at that moment”. This is how Isak Aruh describes the tragedy of his family. In Birkenau, or Auswitz 2, there were three buildings that functioned as gas chambers, 4 crematoriums and several other big holes for burning alive prisoners. In Auswitz 1 there was a scientific institute on which experiments were conducted on people and fetuses, there every prisoner was branded and in this part of the notorious camp the gas cyclone was tested. Auswitz 3 was the place for compulsory work. The German conglomerate invested 700 million reichmarks for building a factory for synthetic rubber where the healthy, but weakened tattooed souls worked. Surrounded by barbed wire through which electricity perpetuates the exhausted, this camp was a nightmare for million and three hundred prisoners who were deported from 1940 to 1945. “Through the holes of the huts we were watching the arrival of trains full of Jews. They were welcomed in the yard with orchestra music, and then the selection, tattooing and getting undressed to the naked skin followed. They were taken to the so called baths where they got soaps and there they released poisonous gas, they were all suffocated in ten minutes, then they were taken to the crematorium, from which high flames could be seem. The Germans said that was the only way to leave Auswitz. They made soaps from the ash. Those were real death factories, where the process was going on continuously”, say those very few who survived. Auswitz, Treblinka, Mathuzen, Bergn-Belzen, Dahau… 6 million Jews. Balance of one human tragedy. Pain for every person, warning for all generations. I wasn’t born in the year 1943, but I hear, see and read about that morning in March when my people were taken from their warm beds violently, without an explanation – Jews from this centuries-old city in which everyone lived in love, cooperation and solidarity. Impatience wasn’t felt. The constant optimism was joining them together, the faith that their life could be better. That’s why the word anti-semitism was unknown to them. That’s why they passed bread to their neighbours secretly, when they were hungry, humiliated, robbed, then, in the Skopje monopoly. There were many questions: where, why, who… The satanic genius, demonism, the crazy ambition to create great Germany and its new world – those are the answers that brought to the catastrophic human cataclysm and to the fierce ruinous destiny of 6 million Jews from Europe, among which are also the Macedonian. That’s HOLOCAUST. Word whose meaning I understood the first time I saw in a museum the photographs of the exhausted bony bodies of Jews thrown in the holes of Jasenovac. Somewhere there are my great grandmother and my great grandfather – I said to myself and I lost consciousness and fell on the ground. Even though I was a child, I felt the pain as a mountain that presses my chest, but it’s surely smaller that the one of those who survived. From 7,200 deported from Macedonia, only insignificant remains of one irreplaceable and big Jewish community. The misinformation of one nationality that couldn’t see the root of the holocaust and the fateful anaesthesia of the spirit, to reveal the danger in front of which it’s standing, to believe in the law of a legal state in a society where they aren’t possible – it remains to the science to explain the phenomenon of the genesis of the holocaust. And if it’s true that the sufferings of one country create its national conscience – according to the theory of the historian Dubnov, then the tragedy of the Macedonian Jews didn’t remain without an answer. Without this horrible tragedy, maybe be wouldn’t have found enough moral strength and ambition in ourselves to start walking along the difficult, but famous path towards our free and independent state Macedonia. And there we will celebrate and remember forever all those who set off and never came back.


Zaklina Muceva
(the author is a member of the MB of the Jewish community in Macedonia)