Gandhi on the Holocaust

Nazi program, up until 1941, called for Jews to be expelled from Europe but not necessarily murdered. The “final solution” became the solution of choice for the Nazis only when it became clear that there was nowhere for the Jews of Europe to go, except to the gas chambers and killing fields.

Holocaust is increasingly revealed as the fundamental watershed in Jewish and human history after which nothing will ever be the same. It is one of those reorienting moments of Jewish history and religion when basic conceptions of God, of humanity, and of Jewish destiny shift.

It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.

“Five or six million Jews are being crushed and we have no guarantee that Palestine will not be dragged into the war,” he said in April 1941. “There are things over which we have no control. We cannot eject Hitler from Europe, we cannot prevent him from getting to Egypt.”