Holocaust Remembrance Day

Monday Is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yad Vashem)

As Siren Sounds in Israel, Millions Pause to Pay Respect to Holocaust Victims
A two-minute siren sounded across Israel on Monday morning, bringing life to a standstill as millions of Israelis observed a moment of silence to honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Pedestrians froze in their tracks, buses stopped on busy streets, and cars on major highways pulled over as the country paused to pay respect to the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. All day, television stations devoted their broadcasts to historical documentaries and movies, and radio stations played somber music and interviews with survivors. (Pravda-Russia)

Holocaust Web Site Draws Thousands of Iranians
Thousands of Iranian surfers every month visit a new Holocaust Web site in Farsi run by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, despite their leadership's questioning the Nazi genocide of Jews, the museum said. (AFP/Middle East Times-Cyprus)

Participants Gather to Recall Eichmann Trial - Joshua Freeman and Ben Uchitelle-Pierce
Of the 110 people who testified at the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, only 10 are alive today. (Jerusalem Post)

Chinese Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust
More than 21,000 non-Jews have been recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, including two Chinese. Pan Junshun, a Chinese living in Ukraine, helped Jewish children. Ho Fengshan, then a Chinese diplomat in Austria, issued visas to many Jews to help them flee the country occupied by Hitler's troops. (People's Daily-China)

A Valuable Truth about the Mideast - John Davis
I learned a valuable truth about the Middle East on a night in Germany when I met a founding mother of Israel, who had fled the Nazis and had helped make a home and a country. People like her will never run away again. (Birmingham [AL] News)

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Yesterday, I had my Sunday school class sit in to listen to stories of a fellow teacher who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She tried to make it as uplifting as possible (given that the kids were only in 4th grade), but there's really no way to tell a story of survival without describing what might have happened and the fate they managed to escape. 

How do you speak of gas showers to ten year olds? 

They bear the burden the same way we all bear the burden.  Jews have been the object of such burning hatred that people decided to kill every one of them.  Not simply to eject them from their midst, but to wipe them and their lives - men, women, elderly, and children - out completely from existence. 

How does one react to being thought of as belonging to a group which was believed so evil that its people should no longer exist?  How do you tell innocent children about it?

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From the Last Testament of Yossel Rakover, during the last hours of the Warsaw Ghetto on April 28, 1943:

I die peacefully, but not complacently; persecuted, but not enslaved; embittered, but not cynical; a believer, but not a supplicant; a lover of God, but no blind amen-sayer of His.

I have followed Him even when He repulsed me.  I have followed His commandments even when He castigated me for it;  I have loved Him and I love Him even when He has hurled me to the earth, tortured me to death, made me an object of shame and ridicule. 

And these are my last words to You, my wrathful God;  nothing will avail You in the least.  You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, but I die exactly as I have lived, crying:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Into Your hands, O Lord, I consign my soul.

           -Zvi Kolitz

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I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.

I believe in love even when not feeling it.

I believe in God even when he is silent.

- - Inscription found on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, where Jews hid from the nazis.