Holocaust remembrance
Amid rising anti-Semitism, Holocaust Remembrance Day offers memory, hope
On Nov. 7, 1940, 287 Jewish men, women and children left Luxembourg for a safer future as chaos, hatred and concentration camps engulfed the European landscape around them.
Four days later, their train stopped on a dead track in Portugal, where they sat for days, under constant guard of the German Gestapo, unable to eat or drink or leave their compartments.
Rachel Salomon’s grandfather, grandmother, father and uncle were aboard that train. To avoid dehydration, which had already taken one woman’s life, Salomon’s grandfather begged a Gestapo solider for a drink of water for his family in exchange for a diamond he’d sewn into his child’s shoe. A few days later, a Gestapo lieutenant needed labor but was dismayed by the women and children in the first two compartments.
“This is not a kindergarten!” he shouted, and sent the train that had become a prison back to Nazi-occupied France. The bout of anger ultimately saved their lives. While trapped in an internment camp in Bayonne, France, the Salomons were able to get visas and escape to the Dominican Republican, where they lived as farmers for nearly eight years until they could relocate to the United States.
Now a teacher in the Whitfield County schools system in Georgia, Rachel Salomon is a testament to her family’s history — and was one of the 80 or so people who gathered Wednesday at the Jewish Cultural Center for Holocaust Remembrance Day to commemorate the 6 million Jews and 6 million persecuted individuals who were tortured and killed by Nazis during World War II.
“This is the first time I’ve talked about this [story] other than with my students,” Rachel Salomon told the crowd. But as painful and dark as these stories are, they serve to remind mankind that such violence should never happen again, to anyone, anywhere.
Known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day is recognized nationwide and comes amid reports of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and in Western Europe. On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report saying the number of assaults against American Jews more than doubled from 2017 to 2018. On Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue in San Diego during Passover services, killing 60-yearold Lori Gilbert-Kaye and injuring three others. And last October, an avowed white supremacist man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11.
Thomas Balázs, another speaker on Wednesday, said his parents lived in fear of anti-Semitism’s return after surviving the Holocaust and leaving Hungary for North America. They converted to Christianity and raised a family, and Balázs said he never knew he was Jewish until his father sat him down at the age of 13 at the kitchen table and told him. Even then, Balázs said, his father swore him to secrecy.
At the time, Balázs said he didn’t understand it. “Now I see they weren’t so crazy.”
Michael Dzik, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, said hatred wins when people feel they must hide their family history.
“We live in a free country and I’m very thankful for that, and people are entitled to free speech,” he said. “But when it comes to hate speech and untruths … it leads to this man in San Diego shooting inside a synagogue. Now, change that word to church or mosque. These are supposed to be the safest places.”
And on Wednesday night, at least for a few hours, the Cultural Center was just that. The swelling, somber notes of a cello spread across the room as people prayed for peace and remembrance. Teenagers read poems written inside Jewish ghettos. And in the front of the room, burning with the memory of the past and the hope of the future, seven candles held flames for all to see through the darkness.