The Central Council of Jews is deeply shocked by the electoral success of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a local election in Thuringia.

“To be clear: not every one of the AfD voters has extreme right-wing views,” said the president of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper.

“But the party whose candidates they voted for is, according to the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, extreme right-wing.”

Schuster said he was deeply concerned that so many people agreed with this. “This is a breach of the dam that the democratic political forces in this country cannot simply accept.”

The International Auschwitz Committee also responded with horror to the result.

Executive Vice President Christoph Heubner said, “Today is a sad day for the Sonneberg district, for Germany and for democracy. A majority of voters have obviously said goodbye to democracy and deliberately opted for an extreme right-wing party of destruction dominated by a Nazi.”

German-Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira, who set up a website shaming selfie-takers at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, says he has halted the project for now after a dozen people apologised for their disrespect.

His “Yolocaust.de” website had combined selfies, often with the participants grinning or striking poses, taken at the memorial with graphic images from Nazi concentration camps, including piles of bodies.

“I’m watching you. Stop doing it,” Shapira told Reuters Television.

The memorial, located near the Brandenburg Gate, comprises 2,711 tombstone-like slabs of granite of varying heights. It is often used by visitors for picnics, yoga and other activities that Shapira said he found troubling.

About 2.5 million people had visited his website, he said.

All 12 people whose selfies he used had contacted him and apologised within a week of the images first being uploaded and most had now removed the inappropriate photos from their private websites.

Such photographs were also common at other sites including the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps, he said.

“It’s about fighting ignorance, making people realise where they are, what this place stands for,” said Shapira, who lost half his family in the Nazi genocide.

Peter Eisenman, the U.S. architect who designed the memorial, said he loved the fact that people sunbathed or picknicked there.

“It is not the camp itself. It is not the sacred ground. It is a ground of remembrance and you can choose to remember in many ways, or not remember,” Eisenman said. “It’s become part of the fabric of the city.”

More worrying, he said, was the growing power of the German right-wing and that such a memorial might not be approved in the first place now.

Friday is an international memorial day for the victims of the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 2 million Sinti and Roma people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexuals.

The ceremonies occur on the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Around 300 of Croatia’s Jewish population held a vigil outside the country’s most notorious concentration camp in protest at the government’s alleged failure to challenge rising neo-Nazi sentiment in the country.

Part of this failure concerns the downplaying of the crimes of Croatia’s pro-Nazi regime. The ultra-nationalist and antisemitic Ustaša regime took power on August 10, 1941, after Axis forces had invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.

Concentration camps were built nationwide to ‘purge’ Croatian society of ‘foreign elements’. This extended to Jews, Serbs, Roma and non-Catholic minorities.

Ustaša fascists exterminated over 500,000 Serbs. They forced 250,000 into exile and made 250,000 more Serbs convert to Catholicism under pain of death, according to Yad Vashem.

The fascist regime murdered  75 per cent of Croatia’s pre-war Jewish population of 40,000. Jews in Croatia now make up 1 per cent of the general population.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma were also murdered by the Ustaša regime, as were between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims.

Croatia’s largest concentration camp was the Jasenovac complex, a string of five camps along the Sava River, east of Zagreb. Close to 100,000 people were murdered in this camp between 1941 and 1945.

Prisoners at the Jasenovac camp received little food. Shelter and sanitary conditions were minimal at best. Guards tortured, assaulted and murdered prisoners with impunity.

The tools of murder included hammers, knives, bars and axes. They also used blowtorches and welding rods to torture prisoners.

Eduard Sajer, a survivor of the Jasenovac concentration camp, recalled how guards had segregated barracks for Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews and Serbs. When not working as an electrician in the camp, Sajer had to dig graves for individuals murdered by a blow to the head from a mallet. He bore witness to the murder of his brother and lost his parents and other siblings in the camp. He watched others being burnt alive.

Granik and Gradina also served as local killing fields.

Croatia’s surviving Jews were deported to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1943.

According to Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on genocides the region “the Ustasha  extermination  of  Serbs  provided  a  catalyst  for  Chetnik  massacres  of  Croat  and  Muslim  civilians“.

Dinko Sakic, commander of the Jasenovac camp, had fled to Argentina after the war and was eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity in 1999. Sakic was responsible for the murder of more than 2,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma. He ordered executions, refused to treat the sick, worked people to death and tortured some with a blowtorch. The courts found that Sakic had personally shot dead two prisoners for smiling.

Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, saw attempts to rehabilitate the image of the Ustaša. Fascists veterans received benefits from government officials. The  late president Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999, was often accused of Holocaust revisionism.

The funeral of Dinko Sakic proved a lavish affair in 2008. According to local media, he  was buried in the Ustasha uniform and described by the priest at the funeral as “a person Croats must be proud of”. Israel’s former ambassador, Shmuel Meirom, condemned the funeral.

Now in 2016, there is a sense of a neo-Nazi revival. Ultra-nationalists shouted pro-Nazi slogans at a rally attended by thousands of people, including Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Ivan Tepes in January.

Similar chants were heard during a recent football match between Israel and Croatia.

The Croatian government is now taking steps to allay fears. President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic met representatives of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascists. Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic issued a statement condemning the Ustashe regime.a

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Hundreds of Hungarians held a candle-lit vigil against a planned statue honouring a pro-Nazi minister. The protest in the city of Székesfehérvár this past Sunday included diplomats from the United States, Israel, Canada, and Washington’s special envoy on anti-Semitism Ira Forman.

Bálint Hóman remains of Hungary’s most toxic reminders of its complicity in the Holocaust. He supported discriminatory policies that disposed Jews of land and denied them university jobs in the 1930s. He advocated a close alliance with Nazi Germany. And supported policies that resulted in the deportation and murder of more than 500,000 Jews.

Székesfehérvár’s mayor, András Cser-Palkovic, a member of the ruling Fidesz party, will ask the Hóman Foundation to reconsider its planned installation. Fidesz has already donated Ft15m ($52,000) to the project. The Hóman Foundation hope to unveil the statue on December 29 – the 130th anniversary of Hóman’s birth.

Hungary’s close ties to Nazi Germany began before the onset of war. In 1938, the Nazis annexed Sudeten region of the now Czech Republic. Hungary gained territory from this action.

That same year, Hungary passed laws that cut Jewish employment by 80 per cent. A year later, and Hungarian laws racialised Jews. Against this backdrop, the Nazis rewarded had Hungary with northern Transylvania.

With the onset of war, Hungary passed a law that drafted Jewish man between the age of 28 and 40 in labour service units. They found themselves working in construction, mining, and building military fortifications. Antisemitism, however, remained rife. Thousands of Jewish labourers died from abuse, malnourishment, cold, and disease. Those caught retreating were burnt alive or murdered by Hungarian guards.

By 1941, the fascist Arrow Cross regime passed laws that officially defined Jewishness. In July of that year, Hungarian forces rounded up Jews with Soviet or Polish citizenship for deportation. Hungarian Jews who could not prove their citizenship also faced deportation. Thousands faced a death march to Kamenets-Podolski. Of the 23,600 murdered, roughly 14,000 to 16,000 were from Hungary.

In 1944, Bálint Hóman joined 29 other MPs in signing a document calling for the complete expulsion of Hungarian Jews.

The Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944 brought greater cooperation. Across Hungary, Jewish communities either had to live outside or in ghettos. Many ghettos only existed for a matter of weeks or days before liquidation.

It took Hungarian forces in coordination with German Security Police less than two months to deport nearly 440,000 Jews in more than 145 trains. Many of the deported ended up in Auschwitz. Some dug fortifications along the Austrian border. As 1944 drew to a close, the only Jewish community left in Hungary resided in Budapest.

Bálint Hóman received a life sentence from the post-war Communist regime after voting to support the war against the Soviet Union. He died in prison in 1951.

The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (MAZSIHISZ) estimate that Hungary’s Jewish population today totals above 120,000.

In 2014, Hungary made its first official apology for its role in the Holocaust. Its ambassador to the UN, Csaba Korosi, said ‘We owe an apology to the victims because the Hungarian state was guilty for the Holocaust’.

On 9 March 2015 Hungary assumed the Chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The furore reflects Hungary’s own struggle to reconcile its role in the Holocaust. Prime Minister Vicktor Orban has made public overtures to stamp out growing antisemitism. His biggest political rival is the far-right Jobbik. A party that continues to make political gains from historical and contemporary prejudices.

Orban’s anti-Muslim rhetoric followed a growing concern in other parts of Europe about the resettlement of migrants and refugees. His party militarised its borders and acknowledges that human rights are ‘secondary‘.

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The Bridging Beliefs Forums were a unique series of workshops across England with Holocaust survivors and survivors of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in 2005.

The Bridging Beliefs Forums were a unique series of talks that took place in Manchester, Leeds, London, Birmingham and Leicester.  In a unique demonstration of togetherness, survivors of the Holocaust and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims came together to share the stage and their experiences to group of students around the UK.  This was a novel project that helped to break down barriers and generate materials that supported Holocaust and genocide education in this country.

Bridging Beliefs Forums – Background

Bridging Beliefs was a two part project, the first part of which was the Forums followed by the Bridging Beliefs Journey.  The Bridging Beliefs Journey took a group of Muslims and Jews across Europe, culminating in visits to Auschwitz and Srebrenica.

The inspiration behind Bridging Beliefs was to reduce barriers between Jews and Muslims which have built up because of the Israel and Palestine issue and which continues to corrode relationships and which should not be the over-riding factor which shapes relationships between both faith groups. Therefore the project looked to show the experiences of genocide survivors, in this case, Muslim and Jewish survivors of genocide.

Linking these two experiences was not a question of making direct comparisons, but just as the Holocaust had a profound and lasting impact on Jews throughout the world, the atrocities committed in Bosnia also had significant effect on Muslims. Both communities which thought that they were ‘safe’ in Europe subsequently found out that they were not and were subject to cruel and systemised genocide.

Bridging Beliefs Forums – Concept

As a population, many in the UK have become hardened to hearing the never ending stories of large numbers of peoples that have been killed, whether through natural or unnatural disasters.  Although they may leave us appalled and upset, we seem to hear stories about unnamed individuals far too frequently to become involved and to find out more about the people who suffered and their life stories.

By having the survivors of both the Holocaust and the Bosnian Detention Camps sharing their personal stories, this project gave participants the opportunity to put faces and names to the horrific stories they had only heard about.  By having survivors of both genocides on stage together we brought forward the faces, the stories and the similarities of genocide that need to be learned so that people can become sensitized to where and how discrimination and isolation of communities takes place.  These forums also gave the audiences the opportunity to take part in a discussion which also gave them the opportunity to think about what they had heard.

Further information on this project can be obtained from Fiyaz Mughal OBE FCMI on info@faith-matters.co.uk