Auschwitz-Birkenau II, main concentration camp. Watch Tower.
When the world acknowledges the Nazis' Muslim victims, it makes it harder for Muslims to deny the Holocaust -- and it corrects a critical historical narrative. Their names and numbers were Ismail (R9954) and Nasreddin (R9955), Mohammed (R9959) and Hassan (R9965). They were Soviet prisoners of war, captured on the eastern front. In late February and early March 1942, they and several dozen other Muslims joined the thousands upon thousands of Abrahams and Sarahs, Isaacs and Rebeccas, Jacobs and Rachels, who together made up the million men, women and children killed at the vast complex of Nazi concentration, labor, and extermination camps in rural Poland known as “Auschwitz.” Jews, of course, were the principal victims of Auschwitz’s barbarity, making up nearly 90 percent of its vast death toll. Even that huge number was itself just a fraction of the six million Jews killed in the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people, known as the Holocaust. When world leaders descend upon Auschwitz on January 27 for the 75th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops — the date chosen by the world community to commemorate the Holocaust — the names of martyrs they will recite will, justly and appropriately, be Jewish. But if the goal of Holocaust remembrance is, at least in part, to counter Holocaust ignorance and denial — a phenomenon that can range from not knowing the basic facts of the Holocaust to rejecting its proven history to glorifying Hitler’s near-success in achieving his genocidal goal — then organisers of the Auschwitz memorial should consider including in their recitation the names of the Nazis’ Muslim victims, too.
Size: 5677px × 3354px
Location: Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau II, main concentration camp.
Photo credit: © Jon Williamson / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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