Between 1939 and 1945, six million Jews were brutally murdered in Europe. Their crime? Being Jewish.
They had committed no crime, they had incited no riots, they had leveled no threats. These Jews had lived for many generations in their home countries and were law-abiding citizens who contributed great minds to culture and science. Leaders from all around Europe were only too happy to round up their Jewish citizens and send them off as despised chattel to be unceremoniously slaughtered. Ancient Jewish populations from such countries as Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, Greece, Romania, Czecheslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Italy and Austria were rounded up with horrifying precision, and sent to the hell of concentration camps, such as the notorious Auschwitz. The Jewish populations assembled were referred to with many vile terms, including slave labor populations. While in their enforced slavery, they were tortured (both physically and psychologically), starved, beaten, forced to live like animals and literally worked to death.
On Monday, we marked Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, we remembered the six million Jews and the millions of other “undesirables” who were silenced by hate, and had no hero to save them. We remember those who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, and who have since passed on. The Holocaust illustrated the worst in humanity, and its sheer magnitude of destruction is still hard to entirely comprehend.
We keep a place in our hearts and minds for those silent victims, children to the elderly. We also understand that something as horrifying and destructive as the Holocaust must never be allowed to happen again. The modern state of Israel was founded for the purpose of providing one entirely safe haven for the wandering minority nation.
The survivors of the Nazi-directed hell were forever marked as victims, with blackened numerical tattoos on their arms. My grandmother was one of those brave survivors who vowed never to forget the horror of Europe, so long as she had a voice. From a young age, I was exposed to stories of the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. I find it incredible that there are still people out there who deny the Holocaust, or try to pooh-pooh it as a distant event.
Ramifications of Europe’s period of absolute evil still remain: I grew up with one grandmother, a result of my family on both sides being decimated because the Nazis decided Jews were sub-human, and most of Europe was too cowardly to stand up to evil.
Please take this week to consider how you can stand up against injustice, and remember all victims across time, who had no voice.
While it’s important to remember the Holocaust, it’s equally important to remember that the Holocaust extended well beyond Jews.
For example, for those that have visited the camps, whole wings were assigned to Christian clergy who are rarely if ever mentioned for fighting back and then paying the ultimate price. Further, Gays, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally retarded were also targeted and exterminated.
Americans of Jewish decent have done an excellent and necessary job of keeping the crimes of the Holocaust in the forefront of people’s minds, however, as a result many of the less informed consider the Holocaust to be exclusively Jewish. Therefore, it’s extremely important to also mention at every opportunity that 7,000,000 people of non-Jewish heritage were also slaughtered.
They too should not be forgotten but frequently are.
While it’s important to remember the Holocaust, it’s equally important to remember that the Holocaust extended well beyond Jews.
For example, for those that have visited the camps, whole wings were assigned to Christian clergy who are rarely if ever mentioned for fighting back and then paying the ultimate price. Further, Gays, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally retarded were also targeted and exterminated.
Americans of Jewish decent have done an excellent and necessary job of keeping the crimes of the Holocaust in the forefront of people’s minds, however, as a result many of the less informed consider the Holocaust to be exclusively Jewish. Therefore, it’s extremely important to also mention at every opportunity that 7,000,000 people of non-Jewish heritage were also slaughtered.
They too should not be forgotten but frequently are.
Merely “remembering” those lost during the Holocaust is meaningless — i.e. they’re already dead. Rather, we should focus on what exactly it was that triggered the holocaust in the first place in hopes of staving off current and future atrocities. Though this proposition seems obvious, we still live in a world were hundreds, if not thousands, are butchered each and every day for reasons similar to those which effected the murders mentioned in the article above.
Robert, I agree that we need to remember all victims of the Holocaust; any murder of innocents is unacceptable, PERIOD.
The “Final Solution” was entirely focused on the Jews, though: actually, Germany assumed it would succeed in taking over the world, and amassed soldiers to send to the Middle East to slaughter those ancient Jewish communities, and there were plans to murder all remaining Jews after. While millions of other innocents died, we should honor and respect their memories, while keeping the event in context: it was the systematic annihilation of one people in particular, and its secondary purpose was the “silencing” of all dissidents and those seen as being in opposition to the totalitarian leadership. The ghosts of Russia under Stalin and of Cambodia under Pol Pot can attest to that…
I completely disagree with and take offense to the last comment, by “asdf.” Would you like it if someone said to forget your deceased family and friends, because “they’re already dead”? The opening argument makes little emotional sense and discounts the value of human life, which incidentally, is part of the problem. Once you start to say it’s ok to forget the dead because “they’re already dead,” you’ve lost comprehension of the meaning of honoring the dead and respecting their memories.
If you read closer, the article actually does say we should look for ways to fight injustice, so the crux of your argument is actually in agreement with the article.. which brings up the point: what was the purpose of the comment other than to disparage the memory of Holocaust victims? Your point made about as much sense as writing to a writer chronicling slavery, and saying “yeah, slavery was bad, but the slaves are dead, so let’s talk about honeysuckle.”
Good points AReader, however as you’ll notice, there’s no reference to “The Final Solution” in the article. The title is Holocaust Remembrance. As such, it seems important to remind readers that 13,000,000 lost their lives in camps during the Holocaust in Europe.
Perhaps of equal or greater importance, people should remember the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. These people were not soldiers, the vast majority were innocent civilians who were identified for their ethic heritage and exterminated.
All must be remembered with the hope such things never happen again.
It would be insensitive to tell any family members of Holocaust victims that their family members and friends were of less importance than others slaughtered.
Robert, you’re splitting hairs here and it frankly seems that you’re trying to divert attention away from the memorialization of Holocaust victims. Why of all days, particularly the one day put aside to memorialize the innocent Jewish victims of the Holocaust, would you make a point to lessen their suffering by implying that the Jews weren’t the main targets of the Holocaust? If that is your impression, you need to read up on history: the “Final Solution” marked the large-scale engineering implementation of the Holocaust; the Holocaust didn’t begin with the opening of Auschwitz: it began a long time before that, punctuated by the establishment of the Jewish ghettos around Europe, Kristallnacht, and laws narrowly restricting the movement and livelihoods of European Jews. Actually a popular revisionist Antisemitic line of argument has been to minimize the role of Antisemitism in the Holocaust by re-writing history and claiming that Jews weren’t the main victim: that is a lie, and at best, an ignorant fallacy. (I do not call you either a liar or ignorant, just pointing out an unfortunate pattern existing, and in some corners, gaining credence, sadly.) Who did Hitler blame in “Mein Kampf,” his political enemies? Nope, the Jews. Who did the “Aryan” Nazis see themselves as being in contrast to, political dissidents? Nope, the Jews. Why did the Nazis develop an extensive plan to invade all corners of the globe, including thousands-of-year-old Jewish communities in the Middle East/Israel? Because the wholesale slaughter of the Jews was the idea. If it wasn’t the driving force of hatred, why would it have been developed?
Remind people of the slaughter of the innocents, but don’t take away what little peace is offered through Holocaust Remembrance Day. By telling people ‘oh well more non-Jews have died around the world so let’s understate the decimation of the Holocaust,’ you help fuel the mischaracterization of the Holocaust as an event without a specific target, when in fact, it was very clear to everyone at the time that the very real target was the Jews.
The Japanese slaughter of millions of innocents was a horror that the Japanese and their victims should never forget; but that slaughter was absolutely not “of equal or greater importance” and it is presumptuous and crude to put a value on human life. Slaughter is slaughter, and simply should not be allowed to happen, period.