Remembering the Holocaust

Genocide by Holocaust
Tuesday, May 2, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day designated for remembering the individuals who died in the Holocaust during World War II. Ceremonies are held at Holocaust memorials, in schools, and in synagogues around the world.

What was the Holocaust, and why is it important to remember?

Civilians suffer in every war, but the Holocaust was different. Germany's Nazi regime led by Adolph Hitler aimed not just to rid the country of Jews, but to eliminate them from the world. Hitler wanted to create a pure Aryan race, and he needed to remove Jewish genes from the gene pool to accomplish this goal. Therefore people found themselves on a deportation list for having a Jewish grandparent, even if they themselves practiced another religion.

Six million Jews were killed throughout Europe by the Nazis. These six million represented half of the world's Jewish population at that time. With them died the Yiddish language and culture of Eastern Europe Jews. This was genocide—systematic measures to exterminate a racial, political, or cultural group.

But the Jews were not the only minority hunted by the Nazi war machine in the name of a pure Aryan race. Up to 500,000 Gypsies, 50,000 homosexuals, as well as handicapped and mentally retarded people and members of various Slav groups died as well.

The Nazis developed an efficient method for this genocide — gas chambers inside of death camps. Hundreds of thousands of people passed through the camps. The strong and healthy were marched off to forced labor.

The young, the old, and the weak were shepherded off to the gas chambers and then burned in crematory ovens. The numbers are staggering. The major death camps were in Nazi-occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1,600,000 died; Treblinka, where 900,000 died; Belzec, where 600,000 died; Chelmno, where 320,000 died; Sobibor,where 250,000 died; Majdanek, where the number of victims is unknown,but is estimated to be between 200,000 and 1,500,000.

Righteous Among the Nations
A group worth remembering and honoring on Holocaust Remembrance Day is the Righteous Among the Nations — a group of individuals across Europe who helped the Jews escape the Nazi death camps. These individuals risked their own freedom and lives in order to hide Jewish families, acted as foster families to Jewish children, employed them to keep them housed and fed, smuggled them out of dangerous areas to other countries, and more. The actions of these men and women demonstrate the compassion, courage, and morality that were still present during the dark years of World War II.

The Righteous Among the Nations project at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem lists over 17,000 individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during WWII.

• Oskar Schindler is the most widely known member of the Righteous Among the Nations, due to Steven Spielberg's movie, Schindler's List. Schindler "adopted" close to 900 Jews who worked in his factory — even if they were unfit for the work — in order to keep them from being sent to the concentration camps. He transferred his factory to a camp when his workers were deported. In all he saved 1,200 Jews.
  
  
• Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara, a Japanese consul in the Soviet Union, who despite official refusal by the Japanese government, provided 2,500 transit visas to help Jews escape the approaching Nazis. "I may have disobeyed my government, but if I didn't, I would be disobeying God." Upon his return to Japan, he was dismissed from the Japanese Foreign Service and had to do odd jobs to make a living.
  
  
• Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman and diplomat. He convinced the Swedish government to send him to Hungary, where he set up "protected houses" flying Swedish flags to shelter thousands of Jews. "I'd never be able to go back to Stockholm without knowing inside myself I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible." Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet troops when they entered Budapest, and it is believed that he died in a Moscow prison.
  
  
• The N.V. Group in the Netherlands smuggled Jewish children out of a holding camp and found hiding places for them throughout the country. They managed to save over 200 children, although the group's organizers paid with their own lives.

Anne Frank, her family, and four other Jews spent two years hidden in a backroom office of a food-products business. Gentile friends aided them in many ways, including smuggling food to them. Eventually an informer turned them in to the Nazis. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne Frank's diary is one of the most famous documents from the Holocaust.

Why Should We Remember?

Holocaust Deniers Revisionist history is the rewriting and reinterpreting of historical facts, often in order to refute widely accepted views. A small group of revisionist historians claim either that the Holocaust never happened or that the death count and the atrocities were far fewer than generally reported. The most visible of these Holocaust deniers is David Irving, who recently lost a libel case in Britain against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for the book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which Lipstadt terms Irving a "Holocaust denier." The judge ruled against Irving, claiming that he indeed distorts the facts of the Holocaust. Read the report: Holocaust denier loses libel suit. You can read the entire text of the judgment: Irving vs. Lipstadt: The Judgment--Nizkor Project

A Hasidic rabbi once said: "The secret of redemption lies in remembrance." Only by remembering can we hope to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The genocides and anti-Semitism since the Holocaust show that we still have not remembered hard enough. Throughout recent decades, civil war, "ethnic cleansing," and territorial stakes have been major causes of genocide in hot spots around the world:

• In Cambodia, the "killing fields" of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge claimed the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians in the late 1970s.
  
  
• In Rwanda in 1994, at least half a million Rwandans of the Tutsi population were killed by members of the Hutu population in retaliation for years of oppressive Tutsi rule. The dead composed about 75% of the Tutsi population.
  
  
• All sides in the conflicts throughout former Yugoslavia have committed atrocities and varying degrees of "ethnic cleansing."

Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem about Babiy Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev that served as a mass grave of 100,000 victims, mostly Jews, killed by Nazi SS squads. Yevtushenko was outraged by the Soviet plans to build a sports stadium at the site in the early 1960s. A memorial was built at the site in 1976.

In recent years, many cities throughout the United States have opened Holocaust museums or erected memorials, in order to educate people about the Holocaust and to remember the dead. Is there a museum or memorial in your town? If so, try to arrange a trip there for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 2, as part of a history class or just as a concerned resident of the world.

Related Reading
The following sites and books offer information and testimonials about the Holocaust:

• Yad Vashem
• The Simon Wiesenthal Center
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, Anne Frank
• Night, Wiesel
• ...I never saw another butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942-1944