Remembrance of Holocaust must continue

As the years quickly pass by, the need to continue holding events in remembrance of the Holocuast only grows more urgent here and around the world.

Consider this week’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The annual Jan. 27 observance was created by the United Nations in 2005 as the world body marked the 60th anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Nazis’ infamous Auschwitz-Birkennau concentration camp in Poland. One million Jews from all over Europe were murdered in gas chambers there, in addition to 100,000 victims from Poland, Russia and elsewhere.

When the event was established the world had already lost a great many of the survivors and others who lived through these events and could share their stories firsthand. Now it’s been 76 years since the Holocaust ended, and few who were there are left.

As time passes, it becomes easier for people to dismiss or even deny the Holocaust. This should matter to us all. Consider that one of the individuals photographed rampaging inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was wearing a shirt that mocked the tragedy of Auschwitz.

Clearly there’s a connection between those who reject the lessons learned from the Nazi era and the push by some misguided Americans to attack the system of government that has helped us endure and thrive for nearly 250 years. It’s not just a matter of concern to Jews and others who were targeted for extermination by Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Wednesday’s commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington focused on that very issue and how President Dwight Eisenhower was determined to prevent such a thing form happening.

The Allied commander toured the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany in 1945 and wrote to Gen. George Marshall about sights that horrified even the most hardened of military men:.

“The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up 20 or 30 naked men, killed by starvation, (Gen.) George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so.

“I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”

A number of Wednesday’s virtual ceremonies around the world were focused particularly on the Holocaust’s impact on children. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, commemorations focused on the nearly quarter-million children murdered on-site by German Nazis. At least 216,000 of those victims were Jewish, many of them deported to the death camp without family.

“The adult world — after all, so often unjust and cruel — has never demonstrated so much of its heartlessness, its evil,” museum director Dr. Piotr Cwyinski said. “This [murder of children] cannot be justified by any ideology, reckoning or politics. This year we want to dedicate the anniversary of liberation to the youngest victims of the camp.”

We’re proud to report that there was a Pennsylvania commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day as well, and that the display at the state Capitol in Harrisburg featured materials donated by the Berks Military History Museum. Among the display items were concentration camp uniforms, badges Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied countries, and artifacts and pictures from the Holocaust era.

The museum has shown admirable dedication to sharing the story of the death camps and the brave men and women who helped defeat the Nazi regime.

Let us join all people of goodwill in repeatedly reminding the world of the tragedy that killed 6 million Jews along with millions of others. We must resolve to expand efforts to educate people of all ages so that they never forget.