"I believe. I believe in the sun even when it is not shining; I believe in love even when feeling it not; and I believe in God, even when God is silent" (from an anonymous poem found on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where some Jews hid from the Nazis).
On January 27, 1945, the largest of the Nazi death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland) was liberated by Soviet troops. In October 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as "International Holocaust Remembrance Day" (IHRD) to commemorate and honor the victims of the Nazi era. Note that the UN-sponsored date is NOT the same thing as Yom HaShoah, which occurs in the spring (Nisan 27).
The systematic genocide of the Jewish people is one of the most heinous crimes in the history of humanity. Reflecting on the atrocities should lead each of us to be vigilant to protect the individual liberties of all people at the hands of the State. Any political ideology or religious creed that elevates the interest of the "collective" over the sanctity of the individual is therefore inherently suspect...
וַתִּתְעַטֵּף עָלַי רוּחִי בְּתוֹכִי יִשְׁתּוֹמֵם לִבִּי׃
My spirit failed within me; my mind was numbed with horror (Psalm 143:4)
We see terrifying analogues of a fascist worldview in our postmodern world today. The traditional view that "truth" is a correspondence between reality and language has been largely abandoned. Today -- as it was in Hitler's Germany -- truth is cynically regarded as a "construct" of interpretation driven by the will to power. Literary deconstruction and fascism go hand in hand. Hegel's dialectic (i.e., the devil's logic) is still at work in the halls of power to this very day, and therefore the message of the Holocaust is a message for all of us to resist tyranny and the political forces that seek to enslave us.
Thank God - am Yisrael Chai: "The people of Israel live!"
About Auschwitz: "Located near the industrial town of Oświęcim in southern Poland (in a portion of the country that was annexed by Germany at the beginning of World War II), Auschwitz was actually three camps in one: a prison camp, an extermination camp, and a slave-labor camp. As the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz has become the emblematic site of the "final solution," a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jews. Also among the dead were some 19,000 Roma who were held at the camp until the Nazis gassed them on July 31, 1944 — the only other victim group gassed in family units alongside the Jews.
As Soviet armies advanced in 1944 and early 1945, Auschwitz was gradually abandoned. On January 18, 1945, some 60,000 prisoners were marched to Wodzisław Śląski, where they were put on freight trains (many in open cars) and sent westward to concentration camps away from the front. One in four died en route from starvation, cold, exhaustion, and despair. Many were shot along the way in what became known as the "death marches." The 7,650 sick or starving prisoners who remained were found by arriving Soviet troops on January 27, 1945." (from Encyclopedia Britanica)
IHRD Resources:
For more information about International Holocaust Remembrance Day, see:
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