The Holocaust didn’t happen as a result of Hitler waving a magic wand. It was the culmination of a long process that started with exploiting the latent hate for Jews that existed in Europe, and escalating it through the media, long before the Nazis took power. One of the most virulently anti-Semitic magazines in Germany made its debut as early as 1923.

Promoting, propagating and disseminating gratuitous hate against the Jews through the media gradually progressed into dehumanization of the Jews. Eventually, over time, hate against Jews became routine.

Sadly, they were unable to confront it in any way, since there was no manner by which to confront it. Whatever laws against hate that existed were too weak to stand up to the torrents of hate that were being heaped on Jews. They fought it as best as possible, but in reality they just had to live with it and hope that since they were living in a “civilized” nation, such hate would not lead to anything worse than yet more hate in the media at most.

It was unimaginable, in the “civilized” nation they were living in, that fellow citizens could one day consider them - the Jews - as lesser human beings, subhuman, deserving of any evil that befalls them.

But in fact, once the German population had become habituated to those conditions of hate for Jews and took it for granted, it was very easy to begin implementing punitive and discriminatory measures against the Jews, and hardly any Germans batted an eye. By then the German population was quite accepting and approving of the notion that Jews were deserving of hate and that they deserved anything that was done to them. It was a very short step from that condition to concentration camps, gas chambers, mass graves, and holocaust.

Those atrocities were committed not by cave men in the Ice Age, but by supposedly civilized Europeans in the 20th century, in suits and ties, in the nation of fine arts, classical music, opera and theatre.

Those atrocities were carried out against ordinary human beings, people exactly like you the reader, who were living their lives in ordinary homes, going about their daily lives like you, enjoying their children and their families, working to make a living, studying to advance their careers, who suddenly found fellow "human beings", herding them and their children away, helpless to cry out for help because those doing that to them were the very ones who should have been protecting them. German civil servants of all kinds, plus numerous ordinary citizens from all walks of life, incredulous as it may seem, deliberately lined up ordinary citizens, like you and your children, or sisters, or parents, dear reader, and systematically murdered them.

One cannot overemphasize that is was done, not by some cave-inhabiting people in ages long forgotten, but by supposedly civilized people only a few decades ago. Mind-boggling!

Now, even several decades after it all happened, those horrific events still bring up in one indescribable emotions of horror and disgust, utter revulsion and anger, mixed in with pity and sadness for the victims.

Anyone who has children or other loved family members who watches - in WWII documentaries - people being herded away in spite of them, like animals, the little children separated forecfully from their parents, would feel utter outrage. Ordinary people who appear to have just been snatched away from their ordinary lives and homes, only hours before being loaded on railway cattle wagons, not knowing what their or their children’s fate will be.

Any person with any sense of humanity must go mad with anger and rage at the scenes and sights, and at the perpetrators of these revolting injustices being done to families and their children.

Truly, it tears at and wrenches one's heart. The thought of one's loved ones going through that kind of experience. It is beyond one's powers of imagination and strikes fear and terror into one's soul.

If only one could have done something to stop it. No matter how many times one watches those scenes one cannot but vividly feel the anguish in those parents as they are led away with their children or elderly parents, as their fate was being decided by savages who believed they were the superior race.

Strong words, sorry, but barbarians are barbarians, and there’s no way around it. Comparatively and considering the time frame, location, people, degree of civilization, progress of humanity, etc. - they are the epitome of barbarism and savagery, if ever one looked for an example in history

And it's an example that happened only a few decades ago in the “civilized” continent of Europe at the hands of people who revelled in their cultural life and arts - much of it brought about by the achievements of Jews - while at the same time ordering the extermination of fellow human beings.

Anything written above doesn’t begin to express one’s horror at the crime. Why did one repeat the same statements about one's "horror" so often here? Because whenever one contemplates it, one is rendered literally speechless, speechless with outrage and anger at the horror of what happened. And in reality, no words can adequately describe what happened, or one’s feelings about what happened. No one can ever truly appreciate the horror of it unless they have been through it. The Holocaust is not just a title.

And no amount of time can ever erase that outrage and anger from any decent human being worthy of being called human.

Lest we forget? How can any decent person ever forget!