By: Yoram Yahav

On August 7 or 8, 1920, during an official NSDAP meeting in Salzburg, Adolph Hitler delivered a speech. The following quotation was taken from it:

“Here is one thing that perhaps distinguishes us from you [Austrians] as far as our programme is concerned, although it is very much in the spirit of things: our attitude to the Jewish problem.

For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.”

On May 22, 2012, during a dinner organized by the German chapter of YPO/WPO (Young and World President Organization), I, Yoram Yahav, son of Eugene and Kathy, grandson of Antal and Carolina, all victims of Adolf  Hitler’s “Final Solution” program – was eating dinner as a privileged VIP guest at The Reichstag Parliament.

For the sake of clarification, the original Reichstag building was caught on fire on February 27, 1933. The Nazis used it as an excuse to withhold the rights of the constitution. During the 12 years of the Nazi rule, the Reichstag building was not used for parliamentary sessions. The few meetings which indeed took place, were set at the Krolloper building, a former opera house opposite the Reichstag building.

Here I was, at ten o’clock at night, sitting across some wonderful and successful German friends, but could not stop thinking of the feeling of closure taking over me. Only seventy years ago, my ancestors, could not walk the streets of Berlin without fearing for their lives, with a yellow badge patched to their shirts. Clearly they could never imagine, even in their wildest dreams, that a Jew from Israel will be standing in this place, erect and proud, and speaking openly over dinner at the German Parliament.

Hitler, I hold my head high, look straight into your sick eyes, and I say calmly, Here I am! I am the living evidence, I am your reality check and the virtual punch to your hideous face that I am alive and kicking. You managed to kill most of my family but you were unable to put out the flames and kill our spirits. I salute to your descendants, some of whom are my friends, who are deeply ashamed of what and who you were and are able to erase your existence from their consciousness and move on. May the memory of my family be engraved in the pages of the history of mankind and may justice always prevail!