Reflections on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Resolution 60/7, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 1, 2005, established January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date was chosen to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 and to encourage humanity to ponder the atrocities of the past. Auschwitz was selected for this observance because it was the largest concentration and death camp established by the Nazis. More than 1,100,000 people, primarily Jews, were murdered there, and their corpses cremated. Reflecting on these awful events serves as both a reminder of the past and a warning for the future.
The genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jewish people is recognized as the ultimate paradigm of evil due to its scale and brutality. It represents the most extensive and horrific attempt to annihilate a people in recorded history. The Nazis destroyed Jewish cemeteries to erase their history, slaughtered adults to eliminate their present, and cut off the lives of children to extinguish any possibility of a future. This genocide marked the first time industrialized factories were built with the sole purpose of producing human death.
In 2010, I met several times a month with the then archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future Pope Francis, to write a book of dialogues on the issues that concerned us most. When we talked about the Holocaust, Bergoglio said: “The Shoah is genocide, like the others from the twentieth century, but it has a distinctive feature. I would not like to say that this is of primary relevance and the others secondary, but there is a distinctive feature, an idolatrous construction against the Jewish people. The pure race, the superior beings, they are idols for the foundation upon which Nazism was built. It is not only a geopolitical problem; there is also a cultural-religious issue. Each Jew that they killed was a slap in the face to the living God in the name of idols” (On Heaven and Earth, 2013, p.178).
In the decades following the Shoah, it has been trivialized many, many times by both tyrants and unscrupulous leaders, including religious people of different faiths. Some questioned the number six million, as if five or one would not also be a horrible tragedy. Others tried to transform victims into perpetrators in stories that distorted the facts to confuse and obscure. Still others sympathized with Nazism and its ideology of death.
Plumbing the depths of the depravity of the Shoah requires listening to the testimonies and reflections of those who were in that hell, especially the poets. Yitzhak Katzenelson (b. near Minsk, 1886 – d. Auschwitz, 1944) was a renowned poet in Yiddish and Hebrew. He wrote in his “The Song of the Murdered Jewish People”:
They, the Jewish children, were the first to perish, all of them,
Almost all without father or mother, eaten by cold, hunger and vermin
Saintly messiahs, sanctified by pain. . . Oh why such punishment?
Why were they first to pay so high a price to evil in the days of slaughter?”
(November 2-4, 1943).
Katzenelson and many others are the voices of those who were there, saw and suffered the horror, and lost their families and their own lives in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps and the end of World War II. Those who survived were freed physically, but their minds remained prisoners of the atrocities they experienced. In these eight decades that have passed, their testimonies have borne witness to the silent cries of the murdered. It remains unclear whether humanity will heed them.
Nazism revived olden, manmade deities that demanded worship through human sacrifice―the sacrifice of millions. This is one reason why this abomination is known as the Holocaust, a term that refers to a sacrifice offered in biblical times through the complete burning of an animal dedicated to God. It is regrettable that the word has become the primary name for the Nazi genocide because the notion of God being pleased by such sacrifices is disgustingly repugnant. Although the Bible contains guidelines for the ancient ritual sacrifice of animals, it abhors and expressly forbids the sacrifice of human beings (Jeremiah 7:31; 32:35). The God of the Bible is a living God (Deuteronomy 5:22; Jeremiah 10:10) who desires humanity to uphold the divine standards of justice and mercy (Deuteronomy 30:20).
In the last eighty years, much of humanity has paid tribute to different idols, distinct from those created by the Nazis, yet these idols are merely shallow projections of the desire for power, wealth, self-aggrandizement, and other ambitions that do not promote life. They are lifeless “deities” to whom prayers of greed and ambition are directed.
Nevertheless, over these eighty years, other kinds of prayers have been whispered. Despite all the turmoil, they have allowed the flame of hope to keep burning, bringing light to soothe our hearts.
Chanah Szenez, or Hannah Senesh, (1921 – 1944) was a poet who wrote in Hebrew. In 1939, faced with a gathering tsunami of antisemitism in her native Hungary, she chose to move to Mandatory Palestine. She became a member of Kibbutz Sdot Yam and volunteered as a paratrooper to assist British forces and the Jewish resistance in occupied Europe. After being arrested by Hungarian forces, she endured torture until her death. One of her most famous poems, "A Walk to Caesarea," written on November 24, 1942, can shine a powerful and prayerful light on our reflections on this day:
My God, My God, May there be no end,
To the sand and the sea,
To the rustle of the waters,
The lightning of the Heavens,
The Human prayer.
Abraham Skorka, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Article published at L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO
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