This is not about the weather in Reykjavík... This is a Holocaust-report from Iceland

I am in Reykjavík for a few days. A strong winter storm is raging outside my window and its snowing too. Hail was hammering on the roof when I woke this morning. In Denmark they call similar weather conditions a catastrophe. But in Denmark they have never seen the likes of the weather in Reykjavík this morning. This is a kind of a weather which has hardened the folks in Iceland for 1100 years.

Yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice. All Sorts - rain, hail, sun, rain again and finally frost. I went to the first ever Holocaust-commemoration in Iceland, which was held in the Polish Embassy in Reykjavík in the evening. A full house ca 80 people attended. Even a few Polish nuns blessed the venue with their presence and the ambassador to the USA and the UK in Iceland came too.

Yesterday, I posted an essay on this blog, where a stated my concerns as a Holocaust-researcher for a venue held in the Polish Embassy. Unfortunately I was not wrong in my worries.

Here is what I witnessed:

   An Icelandic professor of Literature from the University of Iceland compared Holocaust and other Genocides to Trump´s building the "Great" Wall of Trump.

  A former Polish Ambassador to Israel warned against the politicisation of the Holocaust. Funny, that´s exactly what the Poles are doing these years. Their President, Andrzej Sebastian Duda, boycotted the the ceremonies for remembrance the liberation of Auschwitz which were held in Israel  -  because Putin was invited. The former Polish Ambassador to Israel proclaimed that now in 2020, when the last survivors of the Holocaust were nearly all dead, there was possibly a reason for an alternative approach to the commemoration of Holocaust.

  A statement by Polish Ambassador in Iceland, whom I wrote about yesterday, telling the audience that the memorials on the Holocaust in Poland was a great financial burden for his country.

However, In his initial address to the participants when he was describing the Red Army´s rescue of the last prisoners alive in Auschwitz he had a very correct analyses of German war-crimes: Those soldiers, used to seeing all kinds of war atrocities, were dumbfounded after they had crossed the gate with the derisive inscription “Arbeit macht frei”.

While the panel was on the diplomatic notes, this could not be said about some members of the audience.

Catholic Priest Mikolaj Kecic commenting. An Icelandic Holocaust-revisionist showing his skin in the foreground.

  A priest from the town of Keflavík south of the capital Reykjavík, Mikolaj Kecic of the parish of Pope John II south of Reykjavík, attended the commemoration. With a 20.000 strong Polish minority in a population of 350.000 in Iceland there is a demand for Catholic priests in predominately Lutheran Iceland. Pater Kecic made a direct comparison between the Holocaust and the "Israel´s treatment of the Palestinian". Pater Kecic addressed me after the venue and we had a friendly conversation, until I realized that the Polish Pater, whom I had responded to from the audience, told me that Poles did not kill Jews in in the 1941 massacre in Jedwabne, an that one could possibly also discuss the "so called" killing of Jews in Kielce just after the war.

  A man, in the audience, a sturdy, Viking-type of an Icelander in his 60s, turned out to be a Holocaust denier. He claimed that only 300.000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust. 

I repeat what I said in my essay yesterday. No regrets for what I wrote - and no repentance!

The only real remembrance were the wise words of the young Chabad-Rabbi in Iceland, Abraham Feldman, and the excellent talk be Anette Stahl from Sweden, who spoke about the fate of her family in Poland - Not to forget the fitting finishing remarks of US Ambassador Jeffrey Ross Gunter, who told the audience about members of his family who perished in the Holocaust and then punched the stupid remarks where Holocaust and other genocides were being compared to his president´s Wall plans by a professor at the University of Iceland.

Ambassador Jeffrey R. Gunter

A venue at an embassy of an EU-member state that doesn´t really want to face facts about its past and Polish ambassadors talking about gearing down Holocaust commemoration in Poland is a bad message to send to many Polish citizen living and working in Iceland. It is also a wrong message to send to the Icelanders on the ultimate Edge of the European continent. If Polish priests in Iceland tells me that no Polish people killed Jews in Jedwabne, his parishioners might agree. Are there more antisemites among the Poles in Iceland, who believe that the victims of the Holocaust are to be compared to Nazis?

My believe in human goodness allows me to be sure that only a minority of the Polish nation is destroying historic memory for all the rest in the modern and progressive part of Polish Society.

I noticed at the ceremony
Your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can´t remember your face anymore
Your mouth has changed
Your eyes don´t look into mine
The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned
I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly [Quickly in some versions] into autumn

 

Idiot wind ...

 

      Bob Dylan - way back