Ecoblogi – A Blog by Daniel Elkama

Klaus Härö’s film Ei koskaan yksin (2025), about Abraham Stiller, who saved Jews during the war, is very touching and the ending in particular brings tears to the eyes. The film is reminiscent of Schindler’s List in many ways. Abraham Stiller is a great hero who prevented the extradition of all Finnish Jews to Germany, except for eight. The most disgusting character in the film is the head of Valpo, the State Police, a hardened racist Anthoni, who feels a terrible hatred for the Jews and decides to illegally send these 8 to Germany! In the midst of the darkest times in history, there are often also great heroes, such as Abraham Stiller or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who do not bow down to evil but fight against darkness and evil.

There is a terrible, shameful and dark point in Finnish history: in 1942, eight Jews who had fled the Nazis from Estonia to Finland were extradited to Nazi Germany, including two small children. Seven of them died in the Auschwitz extermination camp. On January 27, 2025, it will be 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That day is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust is one of humanity’s most terrible examples of how great evil people are capable of. It is one of the darkest chapters in human history. In her works The Birth of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt talks about how evil can become commonplace and how ordinary people can turn into monsters. The Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest from 2024 depicts how Auschwitz commandant Höss and other Nazis lived ordinary family lives in terraced houses with gardens and children’s playgrounds right next to the concentration camp wall. The wall separated them from the suffering of the Jews. Out of sight, out of mind.

Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi leader who planned the logistics and the smallest details of the extermination of the Jews. After the war, he fled the so-called “rat line” to Argentina. However, in 1960, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad came to fetch him for trial in Jerusalem. He was sentenced to death and hanged in 1962. Hannah Arendt drew attention to Eichmann’s chilling cold-bloodedness. Eichmann maintained until the end that he had done nothing wrong. He even claimed that since childhood he had followed Kant’s categorical imperative, which states: “act in such a way that the principle guiding your actions could be a universal moral law.” Human blindness can be so deep, for example through ideology or religion, that a person commits terrible acts without even realizing that he has done wrong.

I recently visited the World War II Museum in Gdansk, Poland, where there were, among other things, Jewish suitcases and a train car that transported Jews to the death camps. Seeing them made me think about how terrible the systematic nature of the Holocaust was. The mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a carefully planned ‘project’. All this makes it a frightening example of the systematic and completely calculated evil of some people. More than 2 million Polish Jews died. In total, 6 million Jews died and Hitler also killed several million disabled, sick, Roma, black people, gays, leftists and Christians. The Holocaust and the mass murder of other groups of people are an extreme example of otherness and hatred towards “others”. That hatred was so great that it was decided to completely exterminate “others”. It is worrying how the far right has risen around the world in recent years. For example, the return of persecuted refugees to their homeland is completely comparable to the extradition of those 8 Jews to Nazi Germany. Finland has also extradited people and entire families to Iran and Afghanistan, for example, who would have needed the protection required by the UN refugee agreements and who have been killed soon after or locked up in prison and tortured after their return. For example, converting to Christianity or being homosexual is a death sentence in many Muslim countries. Is the resurgence of Nazism due to the fact that the horrors of World War II have already begun to be forgotten?

The current far right, including the Trumpists in the US, the Finns in Finland and the AfD in Germany, are not far from Hitler’s Nazi Germany. What is worrying is that Hitler also came to power completely legally and democratically in the 20s. Berlin was a multicultural and cosmopolitan, liberal city. Ten years later, in 1933, it had become narrow-minded, gloomy, hostile and militaristic. History can turn very quickly in a surprising direction. The so-called ”tipping point” in system thinking means a point of no return to the previous state. This also applies to society. When the Nazis came to power, they changed the system quickly and fundamentally. Only the use of force finally stopped them.

I was in Berlin in 2023 and saw the Holocaust Memorial, which had numerous concrete cubes, which should cause a kind of anxiety. Near the Holocaust Memorial, there was a place where Hitler’s Reich Chancellor’s office and bunker used to be. There was now only a parking lot and one small sign reminding us of the history of the place. The power of the ”great men” and the worshipped dictators of history crumbles in time and democracy triumphs. In time, only one sign or none at all will remain of the power of the great dictators. Hope is not extinguished by cannon fire, is it not stopped by tear gas? Instead, the song of the guns and the angry cries of the dictators will end in time.

Finally, I would like to include the beautiful closing speech from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Dictator (1940).

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Final speech from The Great Dictator Copyright © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved