tikkunolamorgtfo:

This is an article about an apology from the Dutch Red Cross to the Jewish Community, issues last year, in regards to how the organisation failed the nation’s Jews: 

The Dutch Red Cross offered its “deep apologies” for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II following the publication of a research paper on its inaction.

“The war years are undoubtedly a black stain on the pages of our 150-year history,” Inge Brakman, the Dutch Red Cross’ chairwoman, told the De Telegraaf daily Wednesday. There was a “lack of courage” on the part of the organization during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, she said.

“We have offered our deep apologies to the victims and their relatives,” she said, adding that the organization “acknowledges the mistakes made during and after the war.”

In a study commissioned by the Dutch Red Cross, the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies found there was “a serious shortfall in the help given to persecuted Jews in The Netherlands.”

“Dutch political prisoners in camps outside the Netherlands also had to go mostly without the help of the Red Cross,” the study concluded. But it also said that the Red Cross had mounted considerable efforts for some prisoners, though not Jewish ones.

The results were presented in a book by NIOD historian Regina Grueter, launched on Tuesday in Amsterdam after a four-year investigation.

The organization’s headquarters “made things too easy for the occupiers,” said the current Dutch Red Cross director Gijs de Vries.

Of about 140,000 Jews known to have lived in the country at the start of the Second World War, only about 30,000 survived. A total of 107,000 were interned in Camp Westerbork, in the north-east of the country, before being transported to Nazi concentration camps in other countries.

This is how you show contrition for failing act in a way that ultimately aids evil. You acknowledge that your inaction was complicity. You acknowledge your lack of courage, your shortcomings when the time came to do between choosing what is right and what is easy. 

Nobody is saying “these people didn’t do the right thing so you must never be at peace ever in your life, you and your descendants must be cast aside into a pit of despair for all eternity.” We are just asking that you acknowledge your failings, apologise for them, and learn from them.

When you come into my inbox seething with rage because I dared to hold people who complied with the Nazis accountable for their inaction, saying “They had no choice, they were scared for their lives, how dare you!” what you’re telling me is that, not only are you not ashamed by your ancestors’ shortcomings, but that you would, without question, repeat their mistakes. 

If your response is to be defensive rather than ashamed, what you are telling me is that you have learnt nothing from history and that if the Nazis were knocking on your day ~today~ asking for your help in rounding me and my community up into cattle cars, that you would, without hesitation, repeat the sins of the generations that came before you. 

You are not actually defending your grandparents or great-grandparents for being complicit in the extermination of our families, you are defending yourselves in the eventuality that you are complicit in ours.