On April 19th, we observe Holocaust Remembrance Day in the US. The date comes from the Hebrew calendar and coincides to the 27th day of Nisan. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising which began on April 19th through May 16th 1943, which was the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust. In the end, the uprising was brutally crushed by the Nazis with some 13,000 Jews killed during the fighting and the remaining 50,000 residents captured and sent off to concentration and extermination camps, notably Treblinka.
In protest of the inaction of the western governments to intervene in the wholesale destruction of the Jewish people, Polish socialist politician and a Jew himself, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to draw attention to the slaughter. His final statement was “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people”.
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at a talk given by Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter, who painfully recalled his experiences at Auschwitz when he was in his early teens. Izzy, as he is known, was the sole survivor of a mass killing at the camp when an entire building full of people, 85 in all, were liquidated by the Nazis….he was number 86. He expressed his very sincere appreciation and thanks to the liberators of WW2, several of whom shared the stage with him.
Remembrance of the Holocaust began even when the fighting was still going on in Europe. As the camps were discovered, the allies began a careful and thorough documentation process, much of which was used as evidence in the Nuremburg Trials. The camps themselves, in many cases, were left standing as a permanent memorial to the largest crime in human history. Today, the remaining concentration and extermination camps are protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites and stand as a stark contrast to those who would deny the Holocaust happened.
Aiding in the remembrance of the Holocaust is the testimony of the people who were at the camps and ghettos as well as the veterans who liberated these charnel-houses and saw for themselves what human beings are capable of. In one extreme case, US troops from the 157 Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division were so horrified and sickened by what they saw when they liberated Dachau that they rounded up and shot close to 50 German guards in a tearful rage. The young G.I.’s had never encountered anything like this before, but they would carry it with them for the rest of their lives. My late grandfather helped to liberate a sub-camp of Dachau and refused to speak of what he had witnessed there.
Ironically, it was the Nazis themselves that provided some of the best evidence of the Holocaust in the form of meticulous records. Today, these records are a chilling, but effective example of a planned genocide that targeted a specific group of people. It wasn’t some random crime of hate, but a very deliberate attempt to depopulate much of Europe’s Jewry.
At the end of his talk, Izzy Arbeiter uttered the statement that the Holocaust must “Never, ever be allowed to happen again!”, but sadly genocide continues in the 67 years since the end of the Second World War. During the 1970’s it was Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, in the 80’s it was El Salvadorian death squads killing thousands of innocent people, in the 90’s it was Rawanda and the Balkans and more recently it was Dafur. Granted, none of these events reached the level of the Holocaust of the 1940’s, but genocide still continues to be a tool of war in many parts of the world where stability is lacking and warlords are allowed to run amuck. Perhaps the greatest monument to the Holocaust we could ever build would be the complete elimination of genocide in any form. I would like to think that some day in the future we can look back upon these dark events and truthfully say “Never Again!”
In protest of the inaction of the western governments to intervene in the wholesale destruction of the Jewish people, Polish socialist politician and a Jew himself, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide in London to draw attention to the slaughter. His final statement was “I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people”.
Last week, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at a talk given by Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter, who painfully recalled his experiences at Auschwitz when he was in his early teens. Izzy, as he is known, was the sole survivor of a mass killing at the camp when an entire building full of people, 85 in all, were liquidated by the Nazis….he was number 86. He expressed his very sincere appreciation and thanks to the liberators of WW2, several of whom shared the stage with him.
Remembrance of the Holocaust began even when the fighting was still going on in Europe. As the camps were discovered, the allies began a careful and thorough documentation process, much of which was used as evidence in the Nuremburg Trials. The camps themselves, in many cases, were left standing as a permanent memorial to the largest crime in human history. Today, the remaining concentration and extermination camps are protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites and stand as a stark contrast to those who would deny the Holocaust happened.
Aiding in the remembrance of the Holocaust is the testimony of the people who were at the camps and ghettos as well as the veterans who liberated these charnel-houses and saw for themselves what human beings are capable of. In one extreme case, US troops from the 157 Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division were so horrified and sickened by what they saw when they liberated Dachau that they rounded up and shot close to 50 German guards in a tearful rage. The young G.I.’s had never encountered anything like this before, but they would carry it with them for the rest of their lives. My late grandfather helped to liberate a sub-camp of Dachau and refused to speak of what he had witnessed there.
Ironically, it was the Nazis themselves that provided some of the best evidence of the Holocaust in the form of meticulous records. Today, these records are a chilling, but effective example of a planned genocide that targeted a specific group of people. It wasn’t some random crime of hate, but a very deliberate attempt to depopulate much of Europe’s Jewry.
At the end of his talk, Izzy Arbeiter uttered the statement that the Holocaust must “Never, ever be allowed to happen again!”, but sadly genocide continues in the 67 years since the end of the Second World War. During the 1970’s it was Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, in the 80’s it was El Salvadorian death squads killing thousands of innocent people, in the 90’s it was Rawanda and the Balkans and more recently it was Dafur. Granted, none of these events reached the level of the Holocaust of the 1940’s, but genocide still continues to be a tool of war in many parts of the world where stability is lacking and warlords are allowed to run amuck. Perhaps the greatest monument to the Holocaust we could ever build would be the complete elimination of genocide in any form. I would like to think that some day in the future we can look back upon these dark events and truthfully say “Never Again!”
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