Remembrance Day: Yom Hashoah

Remembering Those Who Lived and Those Who Died

Published first in 2010

Michael Streich 

 

Remembrance Day coincides with the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. For Jews it is observed as Yom Hashoah. Remembrance Day is a solemn reminder that although World War II was, in part, about defeating Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, it was a conflict that exposed the worst genocide in modern history, the systematic murder of millions of people solely because they were Jewish. The Holocaust is about millions of individual stories. Few survived and fewer felt comfortable talking about experiences too horrifying to relate, yet stories that needed to be told so that the world would never forget. Remembrance Day 2010 will by on Sunday, April 11^th.

 

Those That Survived

 

Anton worked in a textile factory near Frankfurt during the 1930s. He was well-liked by his supervisors and co-workers. As the decade moved toward the outbreak of war, his supervisor was warned a Nazi Party member that Jews were shortly to be rounded up and transported to the East. The party member knew Anton and his family and held them in high regard.

 

Anton was called into his supervisor’s office and told that the Nazi regime was going to begin rounding up Jews. His co-workers had collected money for a passage to the United States for Anton, his wife, and children. He was given the boarding documents. As Anton left the factory for the last time, he turned back and saw a co-worker in every factory window, waving a white handkerchief.

 

His family was taken by car to the coast where they boarded a liner to take them to America. In their cabin, they found an enormous bouquet of flowers. Having been told to look at it carefully, Anton found an envelope filled with money – a gift from the factory supervisor to help the family start a new life in America. Anton eventually opened his own knitting mill in Pennsylvania.

 

Anton’s story is not unique. After the war, Julius Schatzberg fled Vienna where he had been hidden by friends when the Nazis began to deport Jews. His business partner, Ben, a Polish Jew, was not as fortunate and was sent to a death camp. Julius came to America and opened a sweater factory in Lodi, New Jersey.

 

The story of Bert was not as positive. Born of a Jewish mother and gentile father, he and his brother were considered mischlinge. After his father enlisted in the army to save his family from deportation, the Nazi took them to Concentration Camps anyway. His mother and brother died, but Bert survived, despite brutal treatment that left him disabled for the rest of his life. He also came to America to begin a new life.

 

The Millions that Died

 

Although there were many Jews that survived, hidden by friends and even strangers, the overwhelming majority died in the vast network of death camps and forced labor camps. The most vulnerable were children and older people.

 

Genocide was not unique in the 1940s. Concentration camps had been used long before the Germans. The Armenian genocide resulted in the death of several millions at the hands of the Turks during World War I. In the Congo in Africa, the Belgian government was responsible for the deaths of millions. During the late 1930s, Japan perpetrated the “forgotten holocaust” against millions of Chinese, notably at Nanking, a brutal story chronicled by Iris Chang.

 

But the German Holocaust is by far the most heinous and the most pivotal. This was a calculated act – the “Final Solution,” to obliterate all references to a particular people. It involved Jewish literature, scholarly writing, music, and professional contributions. It ended with the mass murder of anyone remotely connected to “being Jewish.”

 

Remembrance Day should encourage all freedom loving societies to recognize injustice and demand enforcement of the rule of law. At the same time, it is a day to remember and honor the millions whose stories will never be told.

 

Sources:

 

Anecdotes of personal stories obtained through conversations with survivors and/or family members and friends.

 

For information on the Chinese holocaust, see Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

Copyright owned by Michael Streich. Reprints of any kind require written permission.