Today is Holocaust
Memorial Day, which is commemorated on the 27th January because
this is the day when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest
Nazi death camp) each year. Now, perhaps more than ever, we should take time to remember
the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed
beyond recognition during the Holocaust, Nazi Persecution and in other subsequent horrors which have followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and are on-going in Syria.
We should also forever remember the earlier genocides
that inflicted on the Armenians and the Ukrainians. It is only right and proper that we honour the survivors
and continue to challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to
inform our lives today.
By the end of the
Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children had perished in ghettos,
mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps. As Allied
troops made progress across Nazi-occupied Europe, they began to uncover
concentration and extermination camps. The camp of Majdanek in Poland was the
first to be liberated, in summer 1944.
Faced with defeat and
advancing Allied armies Nazi forces burnt the crematoria and the mass graves in
attempts to hide the crimes that they had committed. The Operation Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec,
and Treblinka were dismantled by the Nazis from 1943, and Auschwitz itself was
evacuated in late 1944. The surviving prisoners, weak from starvation and
ill-treatment, and poorly clothed against elements were forced to walk into the
interior of Germany, away from the Allied armies, many thousands died on the
enforced ‘death marches’.
When Soviet soldiers
liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27th January 1945, they found several thousand emaciated
survivors, and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. In
the following months, the Soviets liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and
Ravensbruck.
In the west, US troops
liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, followed by Flossenburg, Dachau and
Mauthausen. British Troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15th April 1945. It is estimated there were over
60,000 prisoners in Belsen by April 1945. Approximately 35,000 prisoners died
of typhus, malnutrition and starvation in the first few months of 1945.
Jewish leaders, were once asked Tony Blair (the then UK prime minister) do we
need Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain? Jonathan Sacks (former Chief Rabbi of
the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for 22 years, until 2013)
noted that this was the question from Tony Blair in 1999, when it was proposed
that the UK have a Holocaust Memorial Day, and Blair wanted the opinion of
British Jewish leaders. They explained that they did not need a specific day to
remember as Jews.
When it comes to remembrance Jewish people already had
Yom ha-Shoa, their own memorial day, which falls soon after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. Every Jew literally (or figuratively) lost family in the
Holocaust. For Jews, Yom ha-Shoa is a grief observed. The Jewish leaders said
that the Holocaust was not just a crime against Jews and other victims – Roma,
Sinti, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political
opponents of the Nazi’s among them; it was an assault on all of
humanity. As has been said by a survivor previously perhaps we really need
additional eleventh commandment along the lines of – Don’t be bystander!
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