In 2014, the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) begins in the evening of Sunday, April 27 and ends in the evening of Monday, April 28. The full name of the day commemorating the victims of the Holocaust is “Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah” — in Hebrew literally translated as the "Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism." It is marked on the 27th day in the month of Nisan — a week after the end of the Passover holiday and a week before Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel's fallen soldiers). It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. This year's focus is 1944: From Extermination to Liberation–the Jews' situation exactly 70 years ago.
In the United States, Congress established the Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust and created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a permanent living memorial to the victims. Holocaust remembrance week is April 27–May 4, 2014. The theme designated by the Museum for the 2014 observance is Confronting the Holocaust: American Responses.
For me, Holocaust
Remembrance encompasses remembering the all the victims murdered by Nazi
Germany. While the term Holocaust
victims generally refers to Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and killed millions of members of other groups they
considered inferior (Untermenschen), undesirable or dangerous:
- Between five and six million Jews
- More than three million Soviet prisoners of war
- More than two million Soviet civilians
- More than one million Polish civilians
- More than one million Yugoslav civilians
- About 70,000 men, women and children with mental and physical handicaps
- More than 200,000 Gypsies
- Unknown numbers of political prisoners, resistance fighters, homosexuals and deportees
Unfortunately, Mr. Churchill was wrong. World War II did not end racial prejudice. It continues to this day. Nor did it end the horror of oppression and genocide:
- Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000
- Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94) 1.6 million (purges and concentration camps)
- Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78) 1,500,000
- Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970) 1,000,000
- Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982) 900,000
- Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994) 800,000
- Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88) 600,000
- Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987) 570,000
- Sukarno (Communists 1965-66) 500,000
- Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002) 400,000
- Mullah Omar - Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001) 400,000
- Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979) 300,000
- Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71) 300,000 (Bangladesh)
- Charles Taylor (Liberia, 1989-1996) 220,000
- Foday Sankoh (Sierra Leone, 1991-2000) 200,000
- Suharto (Aceh, East Timor, New Guinea, 1975-98) 200,000
- Ho Chi Min (Vietnam, 1953-56) 200,000
- Michel Micombero (Burundi, 1972) 150,000
- Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia, 1992-99) 100,000
- Hassan Turabi (Sudan, 1989-1999) 100,000
- Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala, 1982-83) 70,000
- Papa Doc Duvalier (Haiti, 1957-71) 60,000
- Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1930-61) 50,000
- Hissene Habre (Chad, 1982-1990) 40,000
- Hafez Al-Assad (Syria, 1980-2000) 25,000
- Khomeini (Iran, 1979-89) 20,000
- Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe, 1982-87, Ndebele minority) 20,000
- Rafael Videla (Argentina, 1976-83) 13,000
- Paul Koroma (Sierra Leone, 1997) 6,000
- Augusto Pinochet (Chile, 1973) 3,000
Through the years I have written in Nick's Bytes several posts related to the Holocaust:
- 01-27-2010 Lest We Forget: International Holocaust Memorial Day
- 06-16-2011 My Conversation with Elie Wiesel
- 05-15-2008 Elie Wiesel: If We Forget the Story, It Will Happen Again
- 04-14-2013 A Fundamentalist Danger to Modernity
- 05-11-2005
- 05-12-2005
- 09-20-2005 In Memory ofSimon Wiesenthal
- 09-22-2005 On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
- 05-25-2005 A Fundamentalist Is a Fundamentalist
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