Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Ha-Shoah)

Tomorrow (or in fact today at sundown as the new day in Hebrew calender starts at sundown) there will be celebrated The Holocaust Memorial Day, selected by Knesset on 12 April 1951. It is after Passover but falls during the time of uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. This day commemorates all victims of Shoah who perished during WWII. In Israel the siren will sound and the traffic (motorized and pedestrian alike) will cease for 2 minutes. Everybody will stand still to honor those murdered just for being Jews.

Shoah (Holocaust) should never be forgotten. It is a lesson in history but it is also a lesson for today and tomorrow. Humans are capable of utmost good and utmost evil and horror. We should never forget where the evil part of human nature can lead and how the silent majority can be co-guilty of negligence.
The horrors of Nazis towards Jews are well known (or so I should hope) - including humiliating law, degradation, deprivation of dignity, taming public opinion with future horrors, propagating lies about Jewish people leading to unbelievable horror of murdering millions, in a very well organized way. What I would like to remind today is that part of  what happened happened because the world (with notable and nobel exceptions) kept silent. People might not believe but they also didn't want to believe, didn't want to see the truth, didn't want to get engaged, didn't want to identify with those who were being helpless, driven to despair, who were being murdered.

I would like to share with you one very personal experience: when I was for the first time in Yad Vashem in the children hall in the garden where the mirrors reflect single light turning it into millions and the voice repeats names and age of all children who perished in Shoah (it takes over 3 years of constant talk to say all those names) my son was 5. He was not with me neither in Yad Vashem (obviously, he was way to small) nor in Israel. He stayed at the time with my husband at home. When I walked through the dark room with millions of reflections listening to names of the children who were murdered in Holocaust, 2 or 3 of those mentioned while I was ther having been 5 years old while murdered, I had this feeling of panic. For one and only (so far) time I was so afraid for my son without slightest reason. I had the urge (very hard to combat though I succeed) to grab a phone and call my husband, make sure our son was well, was alive.... It was quite few years ago but this was the moment I will never forget.

Finally I would like to share few pieces written by those and about those who perished.
Primo Levi, 24 years old Jew from Turin was one of those taken to Auschwitz. Here are his words about arriving there: "The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to millennial anger.... In less than 10 minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: The night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know... that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living two days later."
Well known Anne Frank, Dutch Jew, wrote by the end of her diary: "I have only one hope (...) That this anti-Semitism is just a passing thing, that the Dutch will show their true colors, that they will never waver from what they know in their hearts to be just, for this is unjust!" Soon afterwards she was denunciated, deported, separated from other family members, murdered and burried in common grave never to be found.
Slovakian Jew Tomi Reichental, survivor living for many years in Ireland and author of the book "I was a boy in Belsen" writes about camp latrine: "In the early days I used to wonder about the "dolls" in the latrines, their naked, glazed limbs and empty staring eyes. I was bewildered by such wanton carelessness. How I wish I had some of my toys with me (...) And then I realised I was mistaken: they weren't dolls at all. (...) None of these newborns survived. Their malnourished mothers had no milk for them, so invariably they didn't last beyond a day or two, whereupon their tiny corpses ended up in the latrine."

Holocaust Memorial Day. Even if we won't stand for 2 minutes to honor those that perished we have to remember. We have to stand for children of survivors, to prevent denying what happened, we have to remember so that the words "NEVER AGAIN" will not be just a slogan but our bearing witness and preventing such a horror from ever happening again.

And here is this year's winning placate from Yad Vashem Institute for Yom Ha Shoah
where are you?