NEVER FORGET!
(the martyrs)
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On this day we remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized. It is a solemn day, beginning at sunset on the 26th of the month of Nisan (Monday evening, April 20, 2009) and ending the following evening, according to the traditional Jewish custom of marking a day. About one and a half million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust were children. The number of children who survived is estimated in the mere thousands.
From the day the Nazis came to power, Jewish children became acquainted with cruelty, first in Germany and, as time passed, in every other country the Germans conquered or forged an alliance. The parents and families of these children were unable to grant them the security and protection they needed. Jewish children were separated from their non-Jewish playmates and expelled from state-sponsored schools. They saw their parents lose the right to support their families, and often witnessed the descent of the family unit into an abyss of despair.
As war broke out and antisemitic policies worsened, the suffering of Jewish children increased: many were doomed to the horrific suffering of life in the ghetto – the bitter cold, the never-ending hunger and a multitude of dangerous diseases. There, cut off from the world, they lived in the shadow of endless terror and violence. At the end of the war, many of these children were lost to their families and their Jewish heritage forever.
Although officially World War Two began on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945, the mistreatment of the Jews began long before then, and progressively got worse. To ensure that Hitler’s “final solution” would be accepted by the highly educated German public, the soil necessary for the Nazis to sow their seeds of evil had to be worked slowly over many years. This was accomplished through numerous State sponsored so-called humorous propaganda, and seemingly innocuous acts such as vandalism, public “outing”/humiliation of Jews in the schools, and boycotts as early as the 1920s. Kristallnacht, often falsely described as the beginning of the “Final Solution”, wasn’t until November 10, 1938. (side note: along with creating an excuse for Nazis to arrest innocent Jews by the thousands, it was also used as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews by the Nazis.)
These are the acts of the actual Nazis. Mass murder, unimaginable cruelty, and true evil. An ideology that culminated in a plan to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth. A political movement that encouraged an highly educated society, and continent (Europe) to forget they were human, scapegoat an innocent people, and act with the utmost cruelty against their own citizens. These were the Nazis! These were the acts of the Nazis in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Romania, The Netherlands, Belarus, Latvia, and Ukraine. They were not monsters, or aliens but human beings who justified their actions, and performed them without remorse. They were doctors, teachers, social workers, lawyers, carpenters, mechanics, train drivers, union leaders, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters….
Below is a video of an ss guard describing the murders he was personally a part of at Treblinka. (this is part 1. There are 6 other parts)
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(*Update: #1 4/21/2009 13:09:54 pst) Teenager Who Escaped From Auschwitz Tells His Story
(*Update #2 4/21/2009 13:39:13 pst) MUST SEE Video: Aftermath of the Holocaust! (Warning Graphic Images)
(*Update #3 4/22/2009 12:54:23 pst) Poignant Reading & Personal Tale: On Work and Freedom.
Tags: Concentration Camps, Holocaust, jews, nazis, Never Again, Warsaw Ghetto, Yom HaShoa
