The Mark 2010

The Holocaust may be in the past, but tough choices remain for the descendants of its survivors.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown awarded medals last month to citizens who helped save the lives of people who would otherwise have been destroyed in the Holocaust. The medals are reportedly etched with the words, “In the Service of Humanity.” Bulgaria also paid tribute to those who fought against the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps.

By contrast, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to cast doubt on the very fact of the Holocaust while threatening the world's only Jewish state with annihilation.

These developments and my recent visit to Yad Vashem, the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, remind me that the Holocaust has always been about choices, both then and now. When the events in question were actually happening, these choices were made by the victims and perpetrators, resistors and collaborators, soldiers and civilians, willing executioners and "righteous gentiles.”

Imagine you’re a German as Hitler is ascending to power. Do you go along with the boycott of your Jewish neighbours' businesses? The first time the Nazis tried this, they were largely rejected. It took five years of constant incitement, separation, and demonization of Jews as sub-humans to get the masses in Germany to go along with their boycott schemes – and when it did happen, individual Germans made that choice with a dreadful enthusiasm.

In the lead-up to the German blitzkrieg, politicians and bureaucrats in countries around the world saw what was happening and were faced with a choice: take in the refugees or turn them back. The official Australian response? "We don't have a Jewish problem and we don't intend to import one." In Canada, it was, "None is too many."

As the war began and conditions worsened, Holocaust victims faced more tough choices. In the ghetto, the Germans demanded that Jewish leaders hand over thousands of Jews each month to be shipped off by train to ... well, no one really knew for sure. It could be a better place. It could be a much worse one. Do you send the strongest ones, who might be able to survive the ordeal of wherever they are going? Or do you send the sick and starving? How do you preserve those who have not yet succumbed to starvation or disease in the overcrowded hell-hole?

The decisions never got easier. A prisoner in a concentration camp wakes up during the night to find his hat is missing. At roll-call in a few hours, he must wear his hat or get a bullet to the brain. Does he lie awake, counting the hours, awaiting his fate? Or does he surreptitiously creep down the line of bunks, hoping to filch a hat from his neighbour, thereby consigning that neighbour to certain death?

In occupied nations, the local populations faced the choice of handing their Jewish neighbours over to the Germans or refusing to cooperate. Particularly in the Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, the choice often seemed to be more about whether to hand the Jews over with a smile and a handshake or enthusiastically carry out the rape, brutalization, and murder themselves while German soldiers looked on.

In other countries, people made different choices. In Bulgaria, enough people chose not to work with the Nazis that 50,000 Jews were saved from deportation to the camps. But local MPs approved anti-Semitic laws modeled on the Nuremberg laws. Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was outlawed, Jewish property was confiscated, and adult men were drafted into forced labour.

Denmark was a better example. Of the 8,000 Jews in that country, all but 51 survived the Holocaust thanks to a united population that chose to hide their Jewish friends and neighbours from the Gestapo.

Such choices are still very relevant today. The words "never again" can be taken to mean that we are united in opposing the genocide of any group or nation (although Darfurians rightly wonder why the rest of the world chose not to live up to that creed).

But for Jews, it has other meanings as well: never again will they put their security in the hands of those who could and often did choose to abandon them in their time of need. Even though many sacrificed blood and treasure to defeat the Nazis, the Israelis wonder why these allies did not, for instance, bomb Auschwitz and destroy a camp where a few hundred prison workers applied industrial methods to murder thousands of people per day.

Tough choices remain for the descendants of those Holocaust survivors who joined their Jewish brethren already living in the Holy Land and formed the UN-mandated Jewish state. Sanctions already in place on Iran and the threat of further sanctions don't seem to be achieving their aim of curtailing what most analysts believe to be a bloody-minded effort to build a bomb. Most Israelis see an Iranian bomb as an existential threat.

Will Israelis feel forced to make the choice to prevent a potential second Holocaust with a pre-emptive strike on Iran? As one Canadian immigrant to Israel put it to me, "Israelis are furious with the international community and formal allies, who seem to be willing to let Israel take care of this. It's as though they feel an Iranian bomb isn't a threat to anyone but Israel. They've got this blind spot when it comes to their own interests. But if, hypothetically, any Israeli prime minister – Livni, Netanyahu, whoever – had actionable intelligence that the Iranians were literally on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, I think there's no doubt they would choose to go in. They would do whatever is necessary."

Tough choices ahead.