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With so much evil in the world, it is easy to lose sight of why the #Holocaust was the single most evil crime in history. Here is how Abba Kovner, a partisan leader of the Vilna Ghetto put it:
The Holocaust was a project of annihilation, the like of which mankind has never seen, different from the pogroms and evil decrees that the persecuted Jewish people have known throughout the ages. For this was not the rioting of an incited rabble...
Nor an outbreak of vengeance by the poor and hungry. Nor the hysterical outcome of religious fanaticism…
For the first time a whole nation was consigned to destruction by order of a government, which organized, planned to the last detail, practiced, and carried out a giant safari, &the hunt was maintained summer and winter, from the Atlantic coast to the foothills of the Caucasus...
from the frozen North sea to the shores of the Mediterranean, everywhere, with no pause for holidays, day and night… and assistants of every tongue took part, in every land, by agreement and on one condition...
that the hunted be members of the Jewish people, men and women, young and old, pregnant, sick, disabled, and healthy, with no exceptions, and to this one purpose were allotted all the financial resources, the transport and the communication services required...
and the hunt for Jews continued as planned for almost a hundred thousand hours… and the Jewish people had no shield or savior. No asylum, no escape.
Source: Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, trans. Edward Levenson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society), 6.