'They had a life and had dreams': a week of remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust was held in the USA

Today in the United States there are more than 120 thousand Jews who survived the Holocaust, writes "Voice of America".

Photo: Shutterstock

Public transport and cars stopped; people froze in places and bowed their heads. A funeral siren sounds for two minutes. So Israel on April 8 honored the memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The Day of Holocaust and Heroism is a day of remembrance for Israelis and for the whole world. The date is timed to coincide with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the largest armed uprising of Jews against the Nazis, which was brutally suppressed.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

“I feel like someone is trying to lift me by holding my shoulder. “They are going to kill me,” I thought. I won't let them kill me. That's all I thought about,” recalls Holocaust survivor Sam Goldberg. “Now—after all this time—are they going to kill me?” Well, I do not! They won't kill me. And I grabbed the shoes and hit the man who picked me up with a wooden shoe. Like this. The guy started crying. And he said, “I'm not going to kill you, I'm an American. I have come to free you. You are free"". So says Sam Goldberg at the annual Holocaust memorial ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Back in 1979, the US Congress designated April 28 and 29 as Holocaust Remembrance Day, since it was on these days in 1945 that American troops liberated Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany. Subsequently, the United States began to honor the memory of millions of dead Jews within a week.

In 2021, President Joe Biden declared the entire week of April 4-11 as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, speaking at a ceremony at the Holocaust Museum, spoke about his stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, as well as the role of Americans, who sounded the alarm and tried in every possible way to help Jews in Europe immigrate to the United States. He criticized the actions of the diplomat Breckenridge Long, who was then head of the State Department's visa department and prevented the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees into the United States trying to avoid persecution by Nazi Germany.

On the subject: World Celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day: The Heartbreaking Stories of Survivors

“Delay, delay and delay while the Nazis continued to kill and kill and kill. But some resisted: a determined group of officials in the Treasury Department proposed cash payments to evacuate thousands of Jews from Romania and France. After numerous orders from officials like Long, they decided to appeal directly to President Roosevelt. Six days later, President Roosevelt announced the creation of the War Refugee Board and began immediately rescuing Jews in Europe and other victims of persecution. This Council saved tens of thousands of Jews and helped hundreds of thousands more. But by that time, more than four million Jews had already lost their lives,” Blinken said.

This year, due to the virtual format of the ceremony, the names of the victims of the Holocaust were not read out. But everyone could register on the website of the museum in Washington and receive an e-mail list of victims of the persecution of Nazi Germany in order to say aloud at least a few names, and thereby help so that these people are not forgotten.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

“Every victim and those who survived are someone’s children. Their parents gave them a name. They went to school and played with friends. They had lives and they had dreams. All this was taken away from them and they were given a number that identified them as part of one group, and not as individuals. By reading their names out loud, we restore to them the individuality and dignity that was taken from them. There is nothing more personal than names. And it also makes us realize what a large number this is - six million,” Diane Salzman, director of the Holocaust Survivor Affairs Department at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, explained this initiative to a VOA Russian Service correspondent.

Holocaust Remembrance Week is also celebrated in Jewish religious institutions in the United States. Hyim Shafner, rabbi of a synagogue in Washington, says that he and parishioners talk not only about the victims of the Nazis, but also about the heroism of those who survived.

“I had parishioners who hid in the woods for years. I asked: how? They warmed themselves under the snow and were given a piece of bread by a resident of a nearby village. There were even Jews who kept the commandments in such conditions. This is heroism that we don't always talk about, but there were many heroes during the Holocaust. I’m also talking about those who gave their lives simply because of their origin, they are also heroes,” says the rabbi.

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“Never again” - these words were once perceived only as a phrase about the desired future. But today, scholars of the history of genocides urge everyone not to forget this sad page of history and to make it their duty to “never again remain silent” when any group of people is persecuted because of their nationality, religion, sexual orientation or race.

The USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education, California, says that today only 15 states in the country have curricula on the Holocaust and genocides.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Voice of America

“We are used to teaching history through books and documents, but what is remarkable about the Holocaust and recent genocides is that these events can be told by those who lived through them. We have collected this evidence in our archives. We hear their voices. The goal is to get as close as possible to the stories of these people, to revive those whom they tried to dehumanize. This way we can “hear” them, and be better in the future so that the tragedy does not happen again,” says its director, Stephen Smith, who represents UNESCO on genocide education, about the activities of the Institute.

More than 120 thousand Jewish Holocaust survivors live in the United States today. In Israel - about 180 thousand. Many of them are already 80-90 years old. They witnessed brutal persecution and murder.

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