But Jews today, whether in the United States or abroad, face increased Jew-hatred.Īccording to FBI statistics, nearly 60 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes are directed at Jews, two percent of the U.S. Tragically, they cannot be brought back to life. *It is important but insufficient to mourn murdered Jews. In addition to remembrance, what are the other enduring imperatives from this era?
As the legendary Winston Churchill said, “An appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile, believing they will be eaten last.” Not only did it not stop the German juggernaut, but instead encouraged it to become even more predatory towards Jews and, more generally, other European nations. Those sobering lessons mustn’t be forgotten.Īnd fourth, appeasement of Nazi Germany, tried by Britain and France in the 1930s, proved a failure. But democracy proved fragile, culture did not stop savagery and education proved no deterrent to brutality. Third, prior to Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Germany had experienced 14 years of democracy in a country widely viewed as among the most educated, cultured, and developed. The longevity, resilience, and lethality of what has been described as the world’s oldest social pathology, antisemitism, should never be underestimated. Rather, it came after centuries of antisemitism - from blood libels to expulsions, from ghettos to inquisitions, from pogroms to forced conversions - on European soil. Second, the Holocaust did not emerge from thin air. They only have us, and without us who will remember not only their tragic fate, but also the vibrancy of their lives. Those victims don’t even have the dignity of graves. Seventy-seven years after the war’s end, why should these events still matter?įirst, to forget the past is to dishonor the memory of the victims. The Jews were pursued for one reason - they were Jews and, according to Adolf Hitler’s demented worldview, all Jews had to be eliminated. In pursuit of this goal, a new alphabet of genocide was created - from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon-b, the nerve gas used in the gas chambers.Įvery Jew was a target, including 1.5 million children. Its aim was the Endlösung, or Final Solution, of the Jewish people.
In all, an estimated six million Jews, or two-thirds of European Jewry, were exterminated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, whether in camps, forced marches, round-ups, or other killing sites, such as Babi Yar, a ravine in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. Other camps included Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Beyond imagination, an estimated 1.1 million were murdered there, of whom one million were Jews from across Europe and one hundred thousand were primarily Soviet prisoners of war, Polish Catholics, and Roma.Īuschwitz-Birkenau was not the only killing site. The camp, actually it was a complex of camps and work sites, was the destination for more than 1.3 million people arrested, deported, and enslaved by Hitler’s regime. The date was chosen because, on January 27, 1945, the infamous Nazi German slave labor and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army. January 27 has been designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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