Remember the Victims of the Holocausts

​Volume 1  1995
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When the commemorative services for the victims of the Nazi holocaust were held, I heard numerous people declaring that we must never forget those who died in Auschwitz. But we have. Some people declared 1995 to be the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But it wasn’t.
During my last visit to Poland, I was told that 1945 did not mark the end of the atrocities at Auschwitz. “The Russians didn’t close down Auschwitz - they filled it with their enemies. The Germans ran Auschwitz for 5 years. The Russians ran Auschwitz for 10 years!” I was astonished but the Polish people assured me that the communists had continued to fill Auschwitz with dissidents, “reactionaries”, “counter-revolutionaries”, “black-marketers”, and other perceived enemies of the state from 1945 to 1955.
“Most of the people who died in Auschwitz were Christians!” The Principal of a Bible College told me that they all saw the chimneys belching smoke from cremations all day long for year after year, until Stalin’s death in 1955. “Those ovens kept working overtime under the Communists.”
Isn’t it time that we gave due respect to the memories of all the victims of Auschwitz - both Jewish and Christian? It seems to be hypocritical to describe 1945 as the year of liberation for Auschwitz. In fact, for Eastern Europe, 1945 marked only the exchanging of Nazi oppression for communist oppression. Both National Socialism (Nazi-ism) and International Socialism (Communism) are essentially the same. They share a common ideological foundation in evolutionism and humanism. It is inexplicable why Marxism has become so much more socially acceptable than Nazi-ism. Both are vicious totalitarian systems of centralised control.
It is time for us to also honour the memory of those 35 million victims of the communist holocaust under Stalin, the over 60 million Chinese victims of the Communist holocaust under Mao Tse Tung, the 114 million Armenian Christians massacred in the Turkish holocaust of 1915, the 3 million Cambodians wiped out by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the 14 million Tutsi Christians hacked to death in the Hutu holocaust of Rwanda and the 55 million innocent babies killed every year, by abortions, worldwide.
Are we being honest when we say at holocaust memorial services: “We will never forget”? Most have never even given a thought to the victims of the hidden holocausts of Communists, or the ongoing holocaust of abortion.
How can we say ‘Never Again!” if we are standing idly by while Christians are being massacred in Sudan and babies are being dismembered, poisoned and torn from their mother’s womb?
When we realise that the holocaust was not confined to one geographic area and not limited to a mere 5 years, then it is a rebuke to our inactivity. When we admit that the holocaust didn’t end 50 years ago, but is continuing to this day, it challenges our comfortable complacency.
Lives are at stake. Future generations will hold us accountable.

Peter Hammond