edit.0731 (SB) slw
History repeats itself
The trains are running again. Sealed freight cars stuffed with 
tens of thousands of hungry, exhausted refugees are rolling in 
Europe. As before, many are not surviving the trip.

This time, the refugees are not Jews but Moslems and Croats. This 
time, instead of creating a "Judenrein" country, the murderers 
speak of "ethnic cleansing." 

Fifty years after the Holocaust, the world looks all too familiar.

Once again men, women and children, singled out for their ethnic 
or religious identity, are rousted at gunpoint from their homes, 
forced into sweltering freight trains, denied food or air, and 
compelled to seek asylum. Once again borders are slammed shut in 
their desperate faces.

This is not supposed to happen in 1992. It was not supposed to 
happen in 1942.

Back then we had the League of Nations. Today we have the United 
Nations. 

Back then the existing world body claimed it couldn't help because 
Nazi racial policies were "internal matters." They could murder 
Jews, Gypsies, gays, Communists -- anyone they pleased -- as long 
as they were "citizens."

Today the United Nations tries to raise funds for the refugees and 
to open political barriers. We've learned that human rights know 
no borders.

Back then people didn't believe such barbarity was possible. 
Deportations? Death camps? Genocide? Unthinkable!

Today we know better. Barbarity has been an all-too-common fact of 
life throughout this ugly century, a century during which 
technology made mass murder efficient.
Still, the European Community and the United States barely murmur 
in protest while television shrugs with indifference. 

Jews, however, can't afford to turn away. 

Whether we personally survived the Holocaust, are children of 
survivors, were out of reach in America or were not even born at 
the time, all of us are heirs to a cruel legacy.

That's why the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations 
Council quickly protested the obscene occurrences in Bosnia-
Herzegovina and has reached out to Bay Area Bosnians.

There's no question the various groups in that region are directly 
appealing to our past, trying to use it to further their own ends. 
And there's no question their own part in that past was 
reprehensible. But most of those suffering today were not even 
born back then. And the suffering of human beings -- without 
reference to who's "wrong" or "right" in today's conflict -- is 
our concern.

We Jews are bound by the memory of our martyrs to thunder in 
protest whenever human rights are abused -- if the words "never 
again" are to have any meaning at all.