“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Holocaust
Survivor of Camp Gusen, Austria. Photo: Public Domain
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. In April, a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses began. Next came expulsion of Jews from civil, university, and state employment. Book burnings of the works of Jewish authors followed, along with the revocation of citizenship of Jewish immigrants and Gypsies. Then, laws were enacted to force the sterilization of the disabled. All of this was in the first five months of Hitler’s appointment.
In 1934, at the death of Germany’s president, Hitler took over as both President and Chancellor, becoming Fuhrer and gaining unlimited power over the nation.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws made Jewish People second-class citizens and under the “Law for the Protection of the German Blood and Honor” were prohibited from inter-marrying with Aryans.
In 1936, Jewish doctors were barred from practicing medicine in German hospitals, and voting rights of Jewish People were revoked. In 1937, the Buchenwald concentration camp opened.
In 1938, Germany required that all Jews in its realm register their property. More concentrations camps opened, all Jewish children were consigned to Jewish schools, and all Jews were required to surrender their driver’s licenses and car registrations. Thousands of Polish Jews were expelled.
On November 9-10, 1938, the Nazi’s orchestrated a simultaneous attack on Jewish communities throughout Germany and Austria. On Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), bands of aggressors murdered 91 Jews, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, and ransacked and looted thousands of Jewish businesses, homes, schools, and hospitals. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were dragged off to concentration camps. Adding insult to injury, Hitler’s Reich fined German Jews one billion German marks for the damage done on Kristallnacht.
In 1939, the German territory expanded by force, and World War II erupted. Across the Nazi territories, things grew steadily worse for Jewish People.
Child survivors of Auschwitz. Photo: Public Domain
In the following years, Jews would have their homes seized and were forced into ghettos to live under deplorable conditions. They were put under strict curfews, forced to surrender radios, and required to wear yellow Stars of David. More and more Jewish People were taken to concentration camps to be summarily executed or suffer a life of slave labor, starvation, torture, inhuman medical experiments, and unspeakable cruelties.
By the time Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated on January 27, 1945, the camp had killed an estimated 1.1 to 1.5 million people (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum). Over 11 million people died in the Holocaust altogether, over six million of them Jewish. It was… a holocaust.
In 2005, the United Nations decreed January 27th an international day of commemoration for victims of the Holocaust. In the declaration, they “urged Member States to develop educational programs to instill the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again” (United Nations).
Today, we remember. We honor those who suffered so traumatically under the evil of the Holocaust. We remember the survivors whose nightmare followed them through the decades, tainting their freedom. We honor these Holocaust victims with our deepest respect and the survivors still among us with our compassionate prayers.
Today, we remember… to ensure it never happens again.
To learn more about elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel and what Jewish Voice is doing to help them, click here.
For more about the Holocaust, personal stories of Holocaust survivors, and Israel’s birth as a natio, visit the following pages of the Jewish Voice web store:
Rose Price: Holocaust, Journey to Forgiveness
Life in the Shadow of the Swastika
