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Holocaust
Remembrance Day
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Hebrew, the term Yom Hashoah refers as the Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day, which was established to remember the Six million Jews, of
whom one and a half million were children, perished in the Holocaust.
Over one million Jews were murdered in the gas chambers. There is
no trace of the victims who were murdered, as they reached Auschwitz,
no name or record were taken. The vast majority of the victims were
unaware of their destination and of their fate. They were transported
to the camps in cattle-cars and arrived in a state of total collapse
The Lager Fuhrer (head of the concentration camp) said to us, "From
now on, you are all numbers. You have no identity. You have no name.
All you have is a number. Except for that number you have nothing."
Jacob (age 17) Poland
A million and a half Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust.
Who were they? Where did they live? What did they like? The Nazis
tried to deprive them of their identity and turn them into faceless
numbers during this great tragedy.
The Remembrance Day begins at sunset on the 27th of the Hebrew
month Nisan and ends the following evening.
Yom Hashoah has been observed with candle lighting, speakers, poems,
prayers, and singing. Often, six candles are lighted to represent
the six million. Holocaust survivors speak about their experiences
or share in the readings. Some ceremonies have people read from
the Book of Names for certain lengths of time in an effort to remember
those that died and to give an understanding of the huge number
of victims.
On this Remembrance Day we remember some of the heartrending moments
of the Holocaust. Here is a brief summary of a few moments that we
remember.
Kristallnacht
Night - November 9, 1938
The evening of
November 9-10, 1938, Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and
Austria. 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps;
91 were killed.
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Thousands
of Jewish shops, businesses and homes were looted and pillaged,
and over 1000 synagogues were destroyed. Because the streets
were covered with broken glass from the looting, this night
came to be known as Kristallnacht, which means Night of the
Broken Glass.
The event took place after five years of increasing assaults
on Jewish property, citizenship rights, and their physical
persons by the Nazis in order to segregate German Jews from
the general public and encourage their emigration.
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The
Warsaw Uprising - August 1, 1944
In 1944, from August 1, through October 2, over
63 days nearly 300,000 Jews were transported from the Warsaw Ghetto
to the Treblinka death camp. In September after all were transported,
nearly 56,000 Jews were left in Warsaw. As reports of the mass killings
in the death camps leaked back to the ghettos, despair gave way to
a determination to resist.
At that time, the Z.O.B. (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) was formed
and slowly moved to take control of the ghetto. The Z.O.B. was comprised
of mostly young Jews in their teens and early 20s.
On January 9, 1943, Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered
the deportation of another 8,000 Jews. This deportation order caught
many Jews by surprise and for many signaled the beginning of the end.
Z.O.B. leader, Mordechai Anielewicz (23 years old), ordered a proclamation
to the remaining ghetto inhabitants to resist going to the rail station
for deportation. In January 1943, the Germans troops entered the Warsaw
Ghetto to begin rounding up Jews for deportation.
With some homemade weapons, the Z.O.B. sprang into action. Using guerilla
tactics, the resistance fighters would quickly strike the Germans.
After the strike, the Germans became much more alert and after a few
days backed away. This withdraw of the Germans was taken as a victory.
But the remaining Jews recognized that the Germans would be back.
So the Z.O.B. prepared hideouts and prepared for the next battle.
The Germans returned and attacked the ghetto, cutting off water, gas
and electricity power. Because of fierce resistance of the Jewish
fighters, eventually, the Germans burned the entire ghetto. The Germans
assumed that extermination of the ghetto could be accomplished within
3 days… this was a bad miscalculation.
April 19, 1943 the uprising began. The fighters were able to hold
off the Germans for nearly a month. The Warsaw uprising came to an
end on May 16, 1943. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, 7,000
were shot and the remainders were transported to concentration camps.
Arriving at Birkenau
Survivors describe
what they saw as the train came to a standstill. It was silent, Suddenly
they heard soldiers marching and dogs barking. They pulled the doors
apart and it was pitch black. The cold air hit us. And then the lights
came on. we saw SS men lined up all along the platform with dogs,
and guns pointing at us. Everybody was frozen. Nobody wanted to move.
Upon arriving at Birkenau, the victims march past SS officer Dr. Mengele,
who "selects" who will live and who will go to the crematory.
The line of the women and children. The women and the children were
separated men. They await the selection. Alone the one that do not
hold a child to the hand or in the arms have a chance survival.
In Auschwitz, the victims were required to inscribe postcards and
letters to their home demonstrating that their resettlement was fine
and they were in good health. All these letters had the same return
address: Arbeitslager Birkenau, bei Neu-Berun, Oberschlesien. In contrast
to prisoners in other camps, these new arrivals were not registered
or given inmate numbers. Shortly after writing these postcards or
letters, these individuals were killed.
The three photographs are taken on May 26, 1944, by two SS: Bernhard
Walter and Ernst Hoffmann, the only ones to have the right to photograph
in the camp.
Death
Camps
March 23, 1933, just two
months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The first concentration
camp was established at Dachau. Dachau developed to be the training
camp for the SS. Among the major camps established in Greater Germany
were Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrueck and Sachsenhausen.
Immediately after they came to power, the Nazis set up camps. December
8, 1941, the first concentration camp was established as an execution
camp was at Chelmno (Kulmhof), Poland., when Jews from the surrounding
area were brought there. At first, gas vans were used for the murder.
Sooner or later, nearly 320,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered
there.
1942 the Nazis started to build three more extermination camps Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka. A large amount of Jews from Poland were murdered
in these camps in 1942 - 1943. All told, about 1.7 million Jews were
murdered in these camps. Majdanek, which was also a concentration-labor
camp, also had a murder area and was consider an extermination camp.
many of the victims of Majdanek were not Jews.
The most well-known of the extermination camps was planted at Auschwitz.
It began to role as an extermination camp in the spring of 1942; heavier
gas chambers were built in nearby Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Sooner
or later, more than a million Jews and several hundred thousand Poles,
Sinti, Roma and nationalities were murdered there.
Below you may witness some horrify pictures. The first image was the
moment what the victims saw when they got to the main entrance to
Birkenau.
Below the first image is a nazi shooting a women while she's hugging
her chilled, the rest of the images are self-explanatory.
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A fundamental belief In Judaism is that nothing occurs without Gods
willpower. History has meaning, cruelty has meaning, and suffering
has meaning. We are a people whose essence is meaning.
People ask, "How can you believe in God after the Holocaust?"
I say, "How can you not believe in God after the Holocaust?"
Is there any survivor who wouldn't say, that it was only because
of miracles is why I'm still alive?
After 2,500 years of persecution, massacres, pogroms, mass murder,
gazed and bloodsheds the Jewish nation still remains strong and
vibrant. Accounting to all laws of nature we should have been vanished
long ago. Can a nation that has been targeted for final destruction
so many times manage to survive?
When the Holy Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled, who
would have expected the survival of our people; who ever dreamed
2,500 years latter the Jewish people retuning back to its holy land.
The Assyrians conquered and exiled half of the Jews and almost sacked
Jerusalem. Not too long after, the Babylonians succeeded in conquering
Jerusalem and exiling the rest of the Jews. We were attacked nearly
just by everyone, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Philistines,
the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Holy
Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Philistines...
and yet tragedy after tragedy, destruction after destruction the
Jewish nation continues. This screams out that there is a divine
power in watching his chosen nation.
The History continues and there were more pogroms and massacres.
Almost every major European country expelled the Jews at some point.
Murders, inquisitions, blood libels and much more were inflicted
on the Jews.
But here we are today, little more than 60 years after the most
brutal, calculated, and organized massacre of the so-called "The
Final Solution," and the Jewish people is still remain strong
and vibrant. The big question unfolds "where are all the great
nations today" their light simply burnt-out and were put away
in history books.
Sociologists and historians cannot adequately explain the phenomenon
of Jewish survival. While they may try, their theories ring hollow
when compared to the sheer improbability of 3500 years of survival
against the fiercest of foes. The only adequate theory is that G-d
has save His people.
Over 300 years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal,
the great French philosopher, to give him proof of the supernatural.
Pascal answered: "Why, the Jews, your Majesty -- the Jews."
Mark Twain, "Concerning the Jews," Harper's Magazine,
1897.
"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled
the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and
passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise,
and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch
high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now,
or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now
what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age,
no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling
of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the
Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of
his immortality?"
Leo Nikolaivitch Tolstoy, unlike Twain, was not an agnostic. He
was a very religious, Russian Orthodox Christian. He is also a very
famous Russian author from the last century, perhaps best known
for his War and Peace. He wrote this in 1908.
"The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He who neither slaughter
nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he who neither
fire, nor sword, nor Inquisition was able to wipe off the face of
the earth. He who was the first to produce the Oracles of God. He
who has been for so long the Guardian of Prophecy and has transmitted
it to the rest of the world. Such a nation cannot be destroyed.
The Jew is as everlasting as Eternity itself."
The very survival of the Jewish people
through recorded time is nothing short of miraculous. The very
fact that Jews exist as a nation today stands in testimony to
the existence of God who acts in history. By any historical measure,
the Jewish people should have disappeared long ago.
Josh detaches the plug alongside his dad's
deathbed to put an end to his pain. The father returns to his
son in a dream and says, have I lived just one more week with
the strong illness pains, I would have cleared-up all my improper
sins, prior coming up to heaven. Why people suffer only God knows,
but looking at history, God awareness screams.
When the Jewish people lives up to its
potential as a light unto the nations, the moral fabric of the
entire world is improved.( Mesilias Yesharim, pg. 21, Feldheim
edition) The nations of the world will see the beauty of Jewish
values and will praise us and want to emulate our ways. (Deuteronomy
4:6; 33:9 with Rashi's explanation)
But if that light is lacking, then the moral fabric of the world
quickly sinks into decay. And then it is only a matter of time
before the Jews are seen as little more than an irritating reminder
of an old-fashioned, restrictive morality, an enemy of the "new
world order" that wants nothing to do with the Chosen People
and their God.
Jewish history is like a 6,000-piece puzzle. At the beginning
you dump the pieces on the table and it makes no sense. But as
we assemble piece after piece, a picture emerges. A picture that
records the action of God in history. And there's no chance or
randomness here. Everything happens for a reason.
By Jewish reckoning we have assembled 5762 (years) of these pieces
and have 238 to go. History is moving toward a conclusion, its
final destination. That final destination was described by Prophet
Isaiah in these words:
"In the days to come, The Mount of the Lord's House shall
stand Firm above the mountains; And it shall tower above the hills.
And all the nations shall gaze on it with joy, And the many peoples
shall go and shall say: Come, Let us go up to the Mount of the
Lord, To the House of the God of Jacob; That He may instruct us
in His ways, And that we may walk in His paths.' For instruction
shall come forth from Zion, The word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
Thus He will judge among the many people. And arbitrate for the
multitude of nations. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not take up
Sword against nation; They shall never again know war."
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