International Holocaust Remembrance Day

My maternal grandmother Helen escaped the ignorance, poverty and misery of Poland during World War I, when her Uncle Louis Salzberg, her mother’s youngest brother, sent for his adored oldest sister and her children to come to America, where he had found a golden land. Had Louis not brought Rose Muriel, Helen, Emanuel and Dorothy to New York, my mother Martha and her five children, Leslie, Allison, Jocelyn, Louis and Melanie, and their children, Ryder, Jesse, Chelsea, Molly, Maxine and Macy, would never have been born. Because all of Louis’s brothers and sisters and their children and grandchildren who refused to leave Radomsk, perished in the Holocaust. Louis paid the passage for as many of his sisters who would come, and a few others did. Their children and grandchildren are the result of their risk-taking, flexibility and good fortune. Like the Jews who fled the Egyptian Pharoah, my family exists because my great grandmother, for whom I am named, had the courage to flee the familiar and start over with nothing in a new land promising religious and personal freedom. Even with passage money, and a few precious things that survived the journey, my great grandmother, my grandmother, my great uncle and great aunt were lucky to make it to the end of the journey in safety. And I was reminded of our luck every Friday night when my grandmother ushered in the Sabbath with a silent prayer for her lost loved ones, her lips moving as she mouthed their names, tears streaming down behind hands covering her eyes.

Although my own outlook is usually sunny, and I hate confrontation and dwelling on negative thoughts, for Grandma's sake and for the sake of the lost generations of my family, I make myself read and think about the horrors of the Holocaust, so that I, at least, will not forget. My own practice is multiplied ten-thousandfold on Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. This day is observed each year throughout the world as a day of commemoration for Jews like my cousins who perished between 1933 – 1945 at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

On April 18, Lake Charles will hold its second annual observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Lake Charles Civic Center Exhibition Hall (Lakefront side), beginning with a photo exhibit opening at 4:00 p.m., followed by a memorial program and candlelight vigil at 5:00 p.m. Lake Charles City Council President Mark Eckard will deliver a welcome, and Rabbi Barry Weinstein of Temple Sinai will explain the meaning of Yom Hashoah. Guests will include both a Holocaust survivor, and the son of a Holocaust survivor who was part of the underground Jewish resistance movement, who will speak about those experiences. McNeese State University Community Clarinet Choir and a musical group from LaGrange High School will perform. For more information about Yom Hashoah events, please call 337-491-1440.

Human history is rife with genocide – the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group – from the earliest recordation of war and conflict among nations. In the 20th Century alone we are familiar with many such tragedies: The deaths of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks before and during World War I; the extermination of 21% of the Cambodian people (1.8 million), including members of political opposition, educated middle class, Buddhist monks, ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, and Muslims, in the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge during the Pol Pot regime; and the Rwandan civil war in 1994 in which 800,000 Tutsis (almost 20% of the population) were killed by the Hutu in only 100 days. But when we refer to the Holocaust, we mean the genocide visited by the Nazis during World War II on the Jews of Europe, who were systematically rounded up for transport to concentration camps, where they were scientifically murdered by Zyklon-B in gas chambers that became crematoria in which their bodies were incinerated, hundreds and thousands of them per hour, in an assembly line. Between the gas chambers and mass shootings, nearly six million Jews from the lands of German occupation – of the nine million that were the entire Jewish population in Europe in 1939 – were erased as if they never had been. Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. Nearly 70 percent.

At least five million non-Jews also perished at Nazi hands, including Romany (Gypsies), religious dissenters such as Jehovah’s witnesses, the disabled, homosexuals, political opponents, Polish and Russian civilians, and more than three million Russian prisoners of war; some historians place the total count at nearly 17 million dead in the Holocaust, including the six million Jews. We know the numbers of those who perished in the concentration camps because the Germans kept meticulous records with names, lists of items of jewelry and clothing removed from prisoners, their prisoner numbers and their dates of death, and most of those records had not been destroyed before Hitler killed himself and Eva Braun in their hideout, as the Axis powers fell to the Allied Forces.

The Germans left records of sadistic medical experiments performed on internees and the precise amount of gas needed to kill one, one hundred or 10,000 people, but the most horrendous facts of the Holocaust have come to us from personal accounts of survivors and from the eyewitness liberators of the camps. The stories of survivors and those who perished have been the subjects of hundreds of books and dozens of films such as The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s Night, Sophie’s Choice, to name just a few, but as the survivors and the liberators age and die, their stories fade from memory, and the voices of Holocaust deniers – the fringe faction that claims the Holocaust never happened – grow louder. We must continue to remember the Holocaust, to keep the memories of witnesses alive, and to say “never again!” for the sake of future generations.

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