About two months after returning from a memorial ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Knesset Member Mohammad Barakeh and chairman of Hadash – the Democratic Front Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel for stressed Monday (April, 12) that the values of the Holocaust must be taught both in Jews and Arab schools.

A window overlooking piles of children’s shoes are the strongest memory MK Barakeh was left with after the trip. “Naturally, the entire visit was emotional, but the windows with piles of children’s shoes was the most difficult point,” he told on Israeli Holocaust Day. “Every shoe is beyond any fascist and any Nazi and that is the place I have been carrying every since.”

According to MK Barakeh, the lesson of the Holocaust must be learned. “The lesson of never again racism, fascism, oppression and persecution are universal values which must be learned everywhere, and the Holocaust is one of the strongest of them”. The leading Communist Party of Israel member added, however, that he had traveled to Auschwitz because it was important for him to take part in the international Holocaust Day events and in not the “Zionist schmaltz of the March of the Living”.

“I don’t feel any connection to the commercialization of Holocaust Day and the attempt to commercialize it for Zionist purposes. For me, whoever links the establishment of the State of Israel to the Holocaust links the Holocaust to the Palestinian people’s Nakba (catastrophe). Our mission in 2010 is to be loyal to the values of ‘fascism and Nazism never again’ and end the Palestinian people’s tragedy.”