Holocaust Review Attacked from Another Angle.

Having now seen the last Holocaust programme of this truly impressive report of the greatest tragedy that has befallen a people and the most hideous crime committed in our time I am disgusted to read in our Salient a review — written well before the end of the broadcast of such misunderstanding of the real message of that film. Obviously the reviewer cannot see the suffering of so many human beings, of one million familes as experienced by one family, cannot feel the anguish of people who see their parents, children, sisters and brothers murdered in front of their eyes, cannot understand the misery and degregation of civilized human beings suffered by an unhuman bestial, mechanical regime.

If your reviewer has no heart, he surely has a psychological problem — he is obsessed with Zionism. The whole tragedy of the Holocaust is a Zionist plot — why did he not say that Hitler was a tool of Zionism; I have heard that before. I have even heard that the Holocaust never happened, but is a Zionist invention? How callous can hatred go, as to blame the victtims for their fate.

Of course the Holocaust is not the first or the last tragedy, but surely the worst in its execution, scope and cruelty. Of course, the lesson has not been learned - and that is the main purpose of the film — for we have experienced the Gulag Camps in Russia, hte massmurder of Idi Amin, the massmurder in Kampuchea and now also the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic groups from Vietnam. While the surviving victims of Nazism finally found refuge and rehabilitation in their own country, your reviewer would like to return to them to the graveyards of Europe. Maybe he would send back the German refugees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, who found a new home in Western German, back to those countries. Or the Palestinians, who ran away misguided by their leaders, to do more fighting instead of urging the rich Arab states to absorb and settle them in the empty spaces of Syria and Iraq.

But that solution would be too simple, humane and logical. It suits those cruel and inhuman Arab oilsheiks and their followers to keep these unfortunate victims of circumstance in miserable camps as political pawns. Just as he would send back the Vietnamese refugees, who brace a watery death (about 30% do drown) back to the country they escaped from, rather than find a new home for them (neither Russia not any of its satelites take part in this rescue work, but in the contrary blame the victims for their fate.)

If Holocaust has not been able to impress on some people its message — of humanity, decency, tolerance and understanding towards your neighbour, even if he is not of the same colour, religion or conviction, then there must be something wrong with this man's thinking, feeling and understanding.

Unthinking ideology coupled with blind, cruel hatred makes an ideal Nazi Storm—trooper.

Danny Hochberg.