Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today may we all bear witness.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Several years ago I visited Israel, first making a stop at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. I had never visited a concentration camp before and tried to steel myself emotionally before I went. It’s hard to even grasp the level of cruelty, sadism, complete lack of humanity that can lead to such unimaginable horror as the Nazi death camps; even more difficult that such a phenomenon as the mass murder of Jews occurred less than a hundred years ago. Every time a small picture and bio comes up on my twitter feed from @AuschwitzMuseum, I am gut-punched once more when I see the pictures of people who were prisoners at the camps and did not survive.

Photo of Marion Ehrlich

Above is a picture of a Jewish girl named Marion, born in Berlin in January of 1928. In November 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz, an experience she did not survive. Looking at her laughing - obviously a happy child when the picture was taken - one can only imagine the trail of fear, incomprehension, grief, pain and horror that led from the moment of that picture to the moment of her death. It is important that we remember her.

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, there is a separate building called The Children’s Memorial. The museum, like Holocaust museums around the world, is a devastating experience. But for me, the children’s memorial took the emotional overwhelm to a whole new level.

Of the six million who perished in the Holocaust, a million and a half of them were children. The children’s memorial itself was donated by a couple from California whose son Uziel was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of two and a half. Memorial candles, a customary Jewish tradition to remember the dead, are reflected infinitely in a dark and somber space within the memorial, creating the impression of millions of stars shining in the firmament. Pictures of children who died in the Holocaust are illumined in the midst of an infinite darkness. The names of murdered children, their ages and countries of origin can be heard in the background

But one thing, more than anything else, has remained with me as permanent spot of brokenness within my heart. It is this: Hitler was eager to kill Jewish children, of course. because what better way to exterminate a race of people than to kill its children. It is almost impossible to imagine the grief and hysteria of mothers seeking to get to their children as they were led to the gallows. And many of the children would look out into the gathered crowd, see their mothers, and say, “Mama, don’t look.”

They knew, as their mothers knew, that this was the end.

Thinking about that, and writing about it now, I cry of course. In thinking about how many millions of times the experience was repeated, I cry more. And I am reminded, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, that my tears are an appropriate response to the utter evil of the Holocaust. This is not a happy day, nor should it be. It is a day of remembrance, and also a reminder of the utter depths to which a society can descend. Germany at the time was an advanced, democratic country which many would have considered invulnerable to the cult-like machinations of one evil man. Yet ultimately it was not.

And we should never forget that.

As a child, I was raised to believe that what happened in Europe during Hitler’s reign of terror was a horror now past. I was raised to believe that nothing like that could ever happen here. I was raised to believe that Nazis threatening our country was something that we, as Americans, would never need to worry about it.

Yet anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Hitler’s rise to power can see uncanny and terrifying comparisons in much of what is occurring here today. Nazis on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the old anti-Semitic trope “Jews shall not replace us,” while the president of the United States said “there are good people on both sides.” Flyers with anti-Semitic language have been distributed in neighborhoods in Florida, California and Colorado even during the last week. And anti-Semitism is on the rise around the world.

Like racism, anti-Semitism (a form of racism, after all) is an ancient virus in the psychic bloodstream of humanity. It is something that each of us is responsible for recognizing, and rejecting, in ourselves and in the world around us.

Today, we remember those who came before. We remember those who died, and we remember those who fought and even died so they could live. As I was leaving Mauthausen, I read a plaque in honor of the Allied soldiers who liberated the camp. I was particularly struck by the fact that the soldiers who arrived that day were on the average twenty years old. They were practically children too. Children who lived, so that others would no longer die.

Dear God,
On this day of painful remembrance,
Please bless the souls of those who died in the Holocaust.
Bless the souls of those who were targeted,
and bless the souls of those who helped them.
Heal the hearts of those who carry the scars of evil,
and awaken our hearts and strengthen us
for the work that we must do today.
Help us
to create a world in which evil such as the Holocaust
will occur no more.
Amen

In the words of Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Holocaust who dedicated his life to our deeper understanding of its significance, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories.”

Today, we must do a lot with them. Today may we all bear witness.