Until well into the 20th century, miners had an infallible technique to protect themselves when accessing the mines: canaries.
They are birds more sensitive than man to lack of oxygen and toxic gases and succumb quickly if there are any.
If the canaries died, the danger was imminent, the miners, alerted, knew they had to flee.
We Jews had the fateful privilege of being, many times, like the canaries in the history of humanity.
Marked and targeted by attacks from different ideologies and regimes, subjected to occupying Abel's place in the human fraternity, we were, in all cases, only the first.
Under Communism or Nazism, under the Czars or the Inquisition, the hunt for the Jew preceded and foreshadowed the hunt for everyone else.
People chosen to confront polytheistic paganism and bring to the world the message of monotheism and the law, we had the place, like the canaries, of being the first victims and alerting the world about what would follow.
In the Shoah it was clear and explicit.
The "master plan" of the Third Reich had as its objective the construction of a "perfect" society based on the social reengineering of all humanity, ensuring the supremacy, of course, of those considered superior, the so-called "Aryans".
First Germany, then the world.
The plan was global.
The extermination of the Jewish people, the anti-race par excellence, the negative of good, foreshadowed what would happen to other peoples and groups that also threatened to contaminate the delirious “Aryan racial” purity.
Black, yellow and red, disabled and sick, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons and political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies, all were destined for extermination or, in the best of cases, to be enslaved in the service of the superior "race".
The delusional plan to redesign the world and society was supposedly scientific but without moral or humanitarian considerations.
The planning, organization and realization of the extermination of the Jews, was the first step of the plan.
We call that the Shoah.
And that January 27, 1945, the Red Army in its overwhelming advance against Nazism stumbled upon Auschwitz.
They didn't know it was there.
They were not with the intention of liberation.
They collided with that horror that confronted them with the terrifying images of emaciated skeletons that only moved their eyes.
Evicted and abandoned by the Nazis in their flight because they could not drag them to the Death March that those who could still stand up had to do.
It was not release.
It was the meeting of a distorted mirror that showed what man can do to man.
The United Nations on this date remembers and honors the victims who could not survive cruelty, torture and gassing.
Let us live this day with the awareness that if Nazism had not been defeated, the world, as we know it, would not exist.
Wars are the worst way to resolve conflicts, but there are necessary wars, such as World War II.
The fight against xenophobia and discrimination against those who are different, critical judgment and the right to express an opinion as one pleases, confidence in a rule of law that will protect us and allow us to be and grow, are the
sine qua non
conditions for Let's stay human.
The war waged by the Allies and the defeat of Nazism made it possible.
No genocide happened in a democracy.
May this date be a perennial reminder of this essential lesson.
Diana Wang is an essayist and psychotherapist.
