Posted on 02/16/2003 5:26:49 AM PST by Clive
Twenty-five years ago, on seeing Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice, I swore never to watch another Holocaust movie again.
Sophie's Choice left me depressed for weeks.
Indeed, I didn't even see Schindler's List, made in 1993, until last year, nine years after it was made, and only then under duress.
Tears of anguish rolled down my cheeks at several points during that movie.
This past week, I broke my vow again and went to see another Holocaust movie, Roman Polanski's The Pianist.
Several times during the screening, I wanted to get up and walk out of the movie house.
This true story of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman and the Warsaw Ghetto simply stuns the senses.
Coincidentally, I saw The Pianist on the very day former prime minister Brian Mulroney made his condemnation of the rise of anti- Semitism in Canada and the world.
Say what you will about Mulroney, but unlike Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, he is a friend of Israel and Canada's Jewish population.
How could we have allowed the death camps to have happened?
Among my Jewish friends are two men -- Sidney Cyngiser and Aron Eichler -- who lived through the Nazi death camps in Poland.
Cyngiser is quietly elegant and Eichler looks like a cuddly teddy bear.
Every time I see them I think: Why would someone want to kill them?
It just doesn't make sense.
The friend I was with when I saw The Pianist remarked after we left the movie house: "Paul, I never really knew why you wrote so many columns defending Jewish people and Israel, but now I understand it all."
Yes, in one stretch of 149 minutes, the length of the movie, it all became so grotesquely real for my friend.
Ah, if only every single person in the world could have such an awakening.
The real reason that six million Jewish men, women and children died in the death camps, and millions more suffered lives of horror, was that no one had the guts to do anything about it.
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler could have been stopped in 1933.
The other dictators of the era, Japanese warlord Hideki Tojo and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, could have been reined in too.
But no one wanted to get involved.
Incidentally, after Poland was freed from the Nazis, concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman didn't taste freedom for long.
For when the Nazis were ousted, the Soviets took over and Poland was held in a Communist grip until 1990.
Szpilman's autobiography, on which the movie was based, was banned by the Communists.
Fortunately, he did live to see Poland finally free, but for just 10 years of his adult life. He died in 2000.
I do not have a single Jewish friend who does not support President George W. Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's campaign to disarm Iraq and eventually other dictatorships in the world, such as North Korea.
Why, you should ask?
Go and see movies like Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List and The Pianist.
You will have the answer.
Jewish people know what happens when you play the coward in the face of bullies.
One must stand up against evil as soon as it appears.
Before it is too late.
Osama bin Laden has told us what he wants to do.
So has Saddam Hussein.
As has Kim Il-Jong.
As Hitler did and as Stalin did.
We all know that on the streets of Israel today, no man, woman or child is safe from suicide bombers.
How long before suicide death squads come to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver -- and Calgary.
Far-fetched?
Sensationalist?
Well, they've already hit New York City.
Hit the Pentagon, too.
Tried to hit the White House.
Unlike the appeasers and the defeatists -- unlike the peace-at-any-cost policy of the Lib-Left pacifist set -- Jewish people know that there is no place to run and hide.
To live, we have to stand up and fight, just as Bush and Blair are prepared to do.
Sometimes it's a process of maturing, sometimes it's an educational process. In the end, unless they openly embrace evil, they all "get it".
Never again.
I wish this were true, but for far too many deluded, pacifist, leftist Jews - like most of my family - it is simply too much reality to fit within the narrow framework of their worldview.
Some are beginning to wake up, to feel the malevolence directed against them, and to understand their own responsibility to defend themselves and all of civilization against such evil, but too many are too willing to ignore it. Within the past month I received an online petition against war in Iraq - and our warmongering President - from my own cousin. She ought to know better.
We have a set of 8 y.o twins. They used to play a 'game'...they'd cover their eyes, 'cuz they thought if they couldn't see 'you', 'you' weren't there anymore.
Too many people play that game and BELIEVE it in 'real life'.
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