International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Struggle to Keep Lessons From Fading

The grim reality is that 80 years after the world got confirmation of the breadth of the Holocaust anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and in Europe.  As the last survivors of the death camps and the Allied soldiers who liberated them dwindle the collective memory has dimmed.  Polls constantly show that younger people are at best foggy on the reality—many can’t place World War II within 50 years on a timeline, are unsure who the combatants were and who was responsible for barely understood atrocities.  Holocaust denial is on the rise spread mainly by those who try to mask their own intentions to “complete the job.”  Right wing nationalism is making a comeback in Europe making substantial gains in several national parliaments and coming to power in Poland and other Eastern European Countries.  

Nazi paraphernalia and symbols were on display during the violent occupation of the U.S. Capitol four years by organized insurrectionists.  No one in the mob seemed a bit perturbed by this guy and his sweatshirt.

In the U.S. White nationalism broke out of the pariah fringe of society and is making a bid for respectability with  barely concealed wink and nod support from MAGA idol Donald Trump.  In 2018 deadly mass shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and at a kosher grocery in New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing attack on a suburban New York home Hanukkah celebration were only some the most widely noted events.  Vandalism and attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other Jewish institutions are on a sharp rise.  Anti-Semitic flyers and propaganda are posted at colleges, universities, and high schools as well as in suburban communities.

The insurrectionist attack on the Capitol included individuals with swastika tattoos, a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt in addition to members of anti-Semitic neo-fascist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.  All of the insurrectionists including wannabe Hitlers were pardoned on day two of Trump’s second term.  White nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic groups were largely purged by along with certain hate speech on Facebook, and other platforms but found  homes elsewhere and on the so-called Dark Web and reappeared on Elon Musk’s X.  Now Mark Zuckerberg has joined Musk and other billionaires cozying up to Trump and demonstrated his fealty by ending fact checking on Meta’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram which will open the floodgates to new waves of anti-Semitic and racist venom.

Confounding attempts to counter these dangerous trends is the Israeli government’s campaign to tar every critic of its brutal and unrelenting attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other cities as anti-Semites.  The Trump was happy to echo those charges and to support efforts to virtually outlaw calls for economic and cultural boycotts of the Jewish state.  Even former Harry Potter actress Emma Watson was smeared as anti-Sematic for daring to criticize Israeli oppression of Palestinians. She was not the last.  

Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza in its war to eradicate Hamas has created more wide-spread destruction over a large heavily populated area than anywhere in history including the bombed out cities of World War II.  Upwards of 90% of the population has been displaced and many are essentially homeless or living in rubble under threat of more attacks.  With Gaza laid waste, a cease fire agreement was finally reached with U.S. support in the last days of the Biden administration.  A measured swap of Hamas hostages for Israeli Palestinian prisoners seems to be holding up, international aid is beginning to flow, and internal refugees are returning to their devastated if not destroyed homes.  Rather than let things settle down and fragile peace break out, Trump gratuitously suggested  that Gaza should be cleaned out of its current residents.  “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said to reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday. and suggested that Egypt and Jordan be compelled to take them in or suffer the consequences—an end to military and civil aid to those countries and drastic economy destroying “tariffs, levies, and taxes.”  

Protestors from Jewish Voice for Peace honored the memory of the Holocaust with protests of Israeli asymmetrical war in Gaza. 

Many Holocaust survivors and their families have recognized Gazans suffering as Jews did and protested  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to even temper the daily assaults.  Instead, he has defied international criticism and vowed to press the war until Hamas is somehow eradicated.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It will be observed—celebrated is certainly the wrong word here—in ways big and small, significant and trivial in many places across the world.  The commemoration comes on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland by the advancing Red Army on January 27, 1945.  American, British, Canadian, and other Allied Forces liberated other camps, but Auschwitz was the pinnacle of efficiency for the Nazi industrialization of mass murder.

Some of the healthier inmates of Auschwitz after liberation by the Red Army.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation the United Nations General Assembly held a special commemorative session.  The following November the General Assembly created the memorial day, which was first observed in 2006.

In November of 1944 as the Red Army advanced from the East and the Allies pressed on the Western Front, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the beginning to the eradication of evidence of the death camps in Poland.   Gassing operations were suspended and crematoria at Auschwitz were ordered destroyed or, in one case, converted into a bomb shelter.  As things got worse, Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in early January directing that “not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."

On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were set on a death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski. Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.

But that left over 8,000 of the weakest and sickest abandoned with scant supplies.  The Red Army 322nd Rifle Division arrived 10 days later to find 7,500 barely alive and 600 corpses lying wherever they finally collapsed.  They also found much evidence of the greater crimes Himmler had hoped to hide—370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair. Coming in the midst of the Yalta Conference and other war news, the liberation received scant media attention at the time.  And the Soviets, who were at best ambivalent at the highest levels about what to do with the liberated Jews, did little to publicly celebrate their role in the liberation, at least at first.

It was only after survivors reached the West and eventually Israel as refugees, that Auschwitz emerged as a special, horrific symbol of the whole Holocaust.

Emaciated survivors at Buchenwald, a major extermination camp liberated by American troops.

The publication of the Diary of Ann Frank, Ellie Wiesel’s Night, and other memoirs by survivors, camp liberators, and on-the-scene journalists made deep public impressions in the West as did films like Judgement at Nuremberg and Stephen Spielberg’s Shindler’s List.  Evidence of the Holocaust has been carefully preserved at Israel’s Yad Vashem, the  world central archive of Holocaust-related information and at Holocaust museums in many major cities.  Public acknowledgement of the Holocaust probably peaked internationally around the turn of the 21st Century and has been eroding since then.

Holocaust Remembrance was muddied in 2020 at the World Holocaust Forum when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the occasion to justify violent oppression of Palestinians and his apartheid regime, to attack all critics of his policy as anti-Semites, and to rouse support for an attack on Iran.

The 75th anniversary was marked by a special meeting at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  Over 50 international leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Prince Charles, and American Vice-President Mike Pence were on hand for the event.  They heard Netanyahu denounce critics of Israel as Anti-Semites and to beat the band for an international attack on Iran.   Leaders except Pence generally distanced themselves from Netanyahu’s remarks and spoke in platitudes of varying degrees of sincerity about preventing any future genocide.

The Hall of Names keeps the memories of individual Holocaust victims alive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 

Today there will be solemn remembrance gatherings at the sites of most of the World War II death camps and in cities around the world.

Together we can truly pledge “Never Again!”  and mean it for both Jews and for the modern targets of repression, oppression, apartheid-like ghettoization, and actual genocidal attacks including the Palestinians.

 

In a Modern European First France Emancipated its Jews

This idealized print celebrates a decree by Napoleon extending emancipation to all of the lands conquered by the Empire.

France became the first nation in the modern era to grant its Jews emancipation under the law—full equality of citizenship rights and the removal of all traditional encumbrances that had been historically placed on the community—on September 28, 1791 by Emperor Napoleon I.  The edict was in line with the liberating thought of the Enlightenment, and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which guaranteed freedom of religion and free exercise of worship.  The new edict when further both in its specificity and in provisions that recognized the freedom of the Jewish community, as well as individuals including lifting what ghetto restraints remained in France.

But France was not absolutely the first nation to do so.  More than 500 years earlier the 1264, the Polish Prince Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz—The General Charter of Jewish Liberties in Poland, an unprecedented document in medieval history that allowed Jews personal freedom, legal autonomy, and separate tribunal for criminal matters as well as safeguards against forced baptism and blood libel. The Charter is ratified again by subsequent Polish Kings including Casimir the Great in 1334, Casimir IV in 1453, and Sigismund I the Old in 1539.   

Polish King Casimir the Great renewed the unprecedented Medieval Statute of Kalisz  giving freedom of religion and rights to Jews.  It stood for more than three centuries until Jesuits gained control of the Polish kingdom and eradicated religious tolerance.

Poland was then on the cultural fringes of Europe, and most importantly, only tenuously connected to the power of the Catholic Church.  General religious tolerance flourished along with Lutherans, Reform (Calvinist), and the paleo-unitarian Polish Brethren.  Poland was also under-populated and needed both Jewish peasants and artisans.  Meanwhile elsewhere in Europe Jews were being blamed for the Black Plague which resulted in waves of pogroms; draconian strictures on residence, occupation, and worship; and eventually the persecution of the Inquisition.  Jews had flocked to Poland and soon it had the largest communities in Europe in which a rich shtetl culture emerged.  However, the Jesuits eventually re-asserted Catholic supremacy in Poland, wiping out Protestant dissent and introducing rising anti-Semitism into the population.  Then Poland, like much of Europe, became a dangerous place for its many Jews.

Under King Edward I in 1290 England became the first European nation to expel its Jewish population more than 200 years before Spain and Portugal did the same.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance were tough on Jews across Europe.  They were expelled from England, Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.  Everywhere they were confined to ghettos and prohibited from most professions—except money lending since The Church forbad usury by Christians.  That made them essential to urban Bürgermeisters, nobles, and royalty but also despised for charging interest.  In most countries Jews could not go abroad on the streets without a Judenhut—a kind of identifying conical hat—or yellow badges, either of which could invite street assault.

The dawning of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, gave Jews a glimmer of hope because it not only challenged the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, but of Protestant ones as well.  Increasing religious diversity among the most literate and creative members of society inevitably led to demands for religious liberty and eventually for what we would call separation of church and state or either the disestablishment of state religion or the allowance of free worship outside them.  Originally Jews were excluded from this calculation.  But ideas like this are hard to keep in a bottle.  By the later part of the 1700’s and under the influence of the American and French Revolutions, most advanced thinkers were including Jews in their vision of religious liberty.

Among the Jews of Western Europe, a small minority had prospered and began to mix more with Gentile society.  They were exposed to the scientific and philosophical currents of the wider society and hoped to adapt insular Jewish life to it.  Some, like Spinoza and Salomon Maimon gained respect as philosophers.  Out of this grew the so-called Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah which advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history outside of the scriptures.  It was at odds with the closed communities of the ghetto and shtetl, with Jewish mysticism, and traditional Orthodox scholarship. 

The interests of the Haskalah and Napoleon coincided.  The Emperor hoped that emancipation would eventually lead to assimilation, intermarriage, voluntary conversion or at least abandonment of Judaism as a faith, and eventually virtual disappearance as an identifiable minority.

In later decrees, Napoleon extended emancipation to all the territories he conquered.  Greece, upon winning its independence from the Ottomans followed suit in 1830.

By the 1840’s the numbers of educated and westernized Jews were ballooning rapidly.  Many were becoming politically active in their countries and were often leading voices in the reform and revolutionary movements that swept Europe.  After the revolutionary year of 1848 emancipation spread rapidly over Europe including German states, Austria-Hungary, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom.  Although de facto discrimination, especially in education and positions in public service continued to be wide-spread, legal encumbrances were fast fading. 

But it was not until after the turn of the 20th Century that those cradles of the Inquisition—Spain and Portugal—declared emancipation.  Russia, the home of millions of Jews, did not act until the Revolution in 1917.

Americans have been known to boast that the United States never had to emancipate its Jews because it never discriminated against them.  While this is true of the government under the Constitution, it was not true of the states.  Most of the founding colonies had some legal restrictions on Jews.  The outstanding exception was Rhode Island which became home to the country’s first Synagogue at Newport.  Quaker Pennsylvania had few restrictions and individual Jews like the Financier of the Revolution Robert Morris prospered there.  Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty annulled the citizenship barriers that previously existed.

But each state had to act on its own.  The US Constitutional ban against the establishment of religion was not then considered binding on the individual states, several of which had established churches—the New England Standing Order and Anglicanism/Episcopalians in most of the Middle and Southern States—and many had restrictions on Jews voting, holding office, or even testifying in court.

One by one the states did abolish these restrictions.   The last to do so was New Hampshire in 1877.

In the late 19th and and 20th Centuries the backlash against Jews was in full swing fueled by the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elder of Zion and scapegoating Jews for economic woes.

The rise of European Jewry was accompanied by a rise in a new kind of anti-Semitism.  The famous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first surfaced in Russia in 1903 and theories of various Jewish conspiracies to rule the world spread. 

The assimilated Jews of Western Europe largely felt secure in their emancipation by the early 20th Century.  They were wrong.  Adolph Hitler and the Nazis voided a century and a half of progress and unleashed unimaginable horrors.

But that is another story.

 

International Holocaust Remembrance Day Struggles to Keep Memory from Fading

The European union supports International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The grim reality is that 79 years after the world got confirmation of the breadth of the Holocaust anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and in Europe.  As the last survivors of the death camps and the Allied soldiers who liberated them dwindle the collective memory has dimmed.  Polls constantly show that younger people are at best foggy on the reality—many can’t place World War II within 50 years on a timeline, are unsure who the combatants were and who was responsible for barely understood atrocities.  Holocaust denial is on the rise spread mainly by those who try to mask their own intentions to “complete the job.”  Right wing nationalism is making a comeback in Europe making substantial gains in several national parliaments and coming to power in Poland and other Eastern European Countries.  

Nazi paraphernalia and symbols were on display during the violent occupation of the U.S. Capitol three years by organized insurrectionists.  No one in the mob seemed a bit perturbed by this guy and his sweatshirt.

In the U.S. White nationalism has broken out of the pariah fringe of society and is making a bid for respectability as it was given barely concealed wink and nod support from the former Resident himself.  In 2018 deadly mass shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and at a kosher grocery in New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing attack on a suburban New York home Hanukkah celebration were only some the most widely noted events.  Vandalism and attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other Jewish institutions are on a sharp rise.  Anti-Semitic flyers and propaganda are being posted at colleges, universities, and high schools as well as in suburban communities.  

The insurrectionist attack on the Capitol included individuals with swastika tattoos, a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt in addition to members of anti-Semitic neo-fascist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.  Even as White nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic groups have largely been purged by Facebook, and other platforms they find homes elsewhere and on the so-called Dark Web and are reappearing on Elon Musk’s X.

Confounding attempts to counter these dangerous trends is the Israeli government’s campaign to tar every critic of its brutal and unrelenting attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other cities as anti-Semites.  The former Cheeto-in-Charge was happy to echo those charges and to support efforts to virtually outlaw calls for economic and cultural boycotts of the Jewish state.  Even former Harry Potter actress Emma Watson was smeared as anti-Sematic for daring to criticize Israeli oppression of Palestinians. She was not the last. 

Now Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza in its war to eradicate Hamas has created more wide-spread destruction over a large heavily populated area than anywhere in history including the bombed out cities of World War II.  Upwards of 90% of the population has been displaced and many are essentially homeless or living in rubble under threat of more attacks.  International aid to the population is little more than a permitted trickle and much of that is disrupted by attacks—20 were shot and killed on Wednesday by Israeli troops at an aid distribution.  More than 20,000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands wounded while hospitals have been destroyed and medical services disrupted by intimidation, arrest, or wounding of essential personnel.   Hunger and actual starvation are rampant.  

Protestors from Jewish Voice for Peace honored the memory of the Holocaust with protests of Israeli asymmetrical war in Gaza. 

Many Holocaust survivors and their families have recognized Gazans suffering as Jews did and protested  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to even temper the daily assaults.  Instead, he has defied international criticism and vowed to press the war until Hamas is somehow irradicated and that operations will continue indefinitely—months, maybe years with no clear plan for the Gazan people and territory.  Netanyahu has gone so far as to publicly scold the United States—and by extension President Biden—for suggesting that attacks be eased, extra care to avoid civilian casualties be taken,  aid allowed to flow more freely, and ultimately a two-state settlement to end generational conflict.

On Friday, the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, acted on a complaint by South Africa that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza ruling that Israel must prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians and do more to help civilians.  The ruling did not order a cease fire and did not directly accuse the government of a policy of genocide.  Of course, the Court is utterly powerless to enforce it order.

The Hall of Names keeps the memories of individual Holocaust victims alive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It will be observed—celebrated is certainly the wrong word here—in ways big and small, significant and trivial in many places across the world.  The commemoration comes on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland by the advancing Red Army on January 27, 1945.  American, British, Canadian, and other Allied Forces liberated other camps, but Auschwitz was the pinnacle of efficiency for the Nazi industrialization of mass murder.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation the United Nations General Assembly held a special commemorative session.  The following November the General Assembly created the memorial day, which was first observed in 2006.

In November of 1944 as the Red Army advanced from the East and the Allies pressed on the Western Front, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the beginning to the eradication of evidence of the death camps in Poland.   Gassing operations were suspended and crematoria at Auschwitz were ordered destroyed or, in one case, converted into a bomb shelter.  As things got worse, Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in early January directing that “not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy.”

On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were set on a death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski. Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.

Some of the healthier inmates of Auschwitz after liberation by the Red Army.

But that left over 8,000 of the weakest and sickest abandoned with scant supplies.  The Red Army 322nd Rifle Division arrived 10 days later to find 7,500 barely alive and 600 corpses lying wherever they finally collapsed.  They also found much evidence of the greater crimes Himmler had hoped to hide—370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair. Coming in the midst of the Yalta Conference and other war news, the liberation received scant media attention at the time.  And the Soviets, who were at best ambivalent at the highest levels about what to do with the liberated Jews, did little to publicly celebrate their role in the liberation, at least at first.

It was only after survivors reached the West and eventually Israel as refugees, that Auschwitz emerged as a special, horrific symbol of the whole Holocaust.

Emaciated survivors at Buchenwald, a major extermination camp liberated by American troops.

The publication of the Diary of Ann Frank, Ellie Wiesel’s Night, and other memoirs by survivors, camp liberators, and on-the-scene journalists made deep public impressions in the West as did films like Stephen Spielberg’s Shindler’s List.  Evidence of the Holocaust has been carefully preserved at Israel’s Yad Vashem, the world central archive of Holocaust-related information and at Holocaust museums in many major cities.  Public acknowledgement of the Holocaust probably peaked internationally around the turn of the 21st Century and has been eroding since then.

The 75th anniversary was marked by a special meeting at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  Over 50 international leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Prince Charles, and American Vice-President Mike Pence were on hand for the event.  They heard Netanyahu denounce critics of Israel as Anti-Semites and to beat the band for an international attack against Iran.   Other leaders, except Pence, generally distanced themselves from Netanyahu’s remarks and spoke in platitudes of varying degrees of sincerity about preventing any future genocide.

Holocaust Remembrance was muddied in 2020 at the World Holocaust Forum when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the occasion to justify violent oppression of Palestinians and his apartheid regime, to attack all critics of his policy as anti-Semites, and to rouse support for an attack on Iran.

Today there will be solemn remembrance gatherings at the sites of most of the World War II death camps and in cities around the world

Together we can truly pledge “Never Again!”  and mean it for both Jews and for the modern targets of repression, oppression, apartheid-like ghettoization, and even actual genocidal attacks including the Palestinians.