Now here is something to consider - as per this letter which I received a few hours ago from Germany:
"Greetings,
This morning I set off to document the Jewish part of the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof (Cemetery) here in Hamburg. I took a video camera and a still camera with me, but only one roll of film . . . after all, after 1945, how big could a Jewish cemetery in Hamburg be?
The Ohlsdorfer cemetery in Hamburg is huge and is divided up into a number of smaller cemeteries, The graves of many soldiers killed during WW1 and WW2, for example, are lined up - hundreds and hundreds of headstones in rows under beautiful green trees in a large quiet field. But the mass graves of the nearly 47,000 Hamburg civilians killed in the bombing fire storms of 1943 are buried, mostly unnamed, under huge headstones that merely carry the name of the suburb the charred bodies were found in.
The beauty and quiet of the bright green landscaping seem to soften the anger and sadness that well up within me when I try to take in the enormity of the numbers who are buried here, most of whom died in such tragic circumstances.
I've never bothered visiting the Jewish cemetery before - because it is separated from the main cemetery by high wire fences and steel gates? These sort of remind me of something?
Visiting hours are every day except Saturday, and a large sign says 'Beware of vicious dog'. Another sign requests all visitors to cover their heads when visiting. The first tribute I came across was a flower bed with a large Grecian type urn in the middle of it with a sign that says 'ASHES from AUSCHWITZ' . (...)
The "rabidly anti-semitic Nazis" were in power for 12 years. So I was really surprised to find that the Jewish cemetery is so large, at least 500 meters square in area . That can take a lot of gravestones - and there are a lot, a few thousand I'd guess. Except for the Hebrew script on most of the headstones it all looked very similar to the Gentile cemetery - long rows of gravestones in and under large trees with bright green spring foliage blowing lightly in the wind.
I looked at their names, which was like browsing through a New York telephone book, looked at their ages and of course the dates of their births and deaths. I was becoming more and more surprised. Clusters of hundreds of these gravestones were between 60 and 120 years old. Dozens of others gave the dates of death for the war years 1939-1945. I only saw three or four headstones where it was claimed the person below had died in a KZ (Which is strange because the Germans use the letters KL and not KZ for a Konzentrations Lager.)
What surprised me wasn't the fact that these people had gotten old and died but the fact that these gravestones, although very old, some more than a hundred years old and carrying old Hebrew script had never been smashed, damaged, desecrated, scratched, dumped on or painted on. Just the opposite - they were in relatively good condition for their age.
I knew this simply couldn't be true. The Nazis with their crazy unbalanced anti-semitism would never have allowed these gravestones to stand around as constant reminders of their most hated enemies. So I went looking for the caretaker and found two, one of whom was doing an excellent imitation of a rabbi. Both were loading earth into a wheelbarrow. I went up to the other man and asked him how the graves and stones had survived the Nazi period. He looked at me and said quietly:
"They never touched or damaged anything here EXCEPT towards the end of the war. They took away the small metal fences that surrounded many graves, to melt down. Other than that, the place is pretty well in its original state."
I cannot really explain it myself, except maybe the Nazis were so busy fighting the war and wreckin' other countries they just never found the time and energy to get into a bit of good ole Saturday night Desecratin'.
Thought for the Day:
"In Germany, graves of Christian Germans are opened up after 20-25 years and emptied of bones which are ground to dust. The headstones are removed. The corpses of newly deceased people are buried in coffins in the previously used graves to save on cemetery space. The graves of buried Jews are left undisturbed in perpetuity. The Germans obviously think more highly of their Jewish dead than of their own."
(Ernst Zundel)
Back to Table of Contents of the May 1999 ZGrams