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UPDATE:
It is now “Today” in Auschwitz, and indeed many survivors’ voices — sometimes breaking, sometimes hardly audible through the sobs and tears — spoke there.
Let us hope the world will indeed listen to those voices.
Read them, listen with your heart to them, here, here and here.
This is the statement by Secretary of State John Kerry:
Today, Teresa and I join all Americans in marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and in honoring the memory of all the victims of the Holocaust.
We bow our heads in remembrance of the six million Jews and the millions more murdered by the Nazis – including Poles, Roma, LGBT people, persons with disabilities. I do so with the added weight of knowing more than I ever have before about the losses my grandfather’s family suffered in the Holocaust, a history my brother Cam passionately helped unearth in his own visit to the Czech Republic. Whether our own families have personal connections to these horrors or not, none of us should ever forget that behind each of the victims was not a number, but a name and the story of a life cut short, a future not realized, a family bereft, and an irredeemable loss of talent and love.
We owe it to each of them to keep their stories alive so the world will never again tolerate such evil. We keep faith with the survivors who emerged from the cauldron of Holocaust and war to build institutions and order dedicated to the principle that never again should crimes of such horror and magnitude be committed on this Earth.
Edward R. Murrow referred to the Holocaust as “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp.” And yet the reality is that the Shoah was not only imagined, it was carried out by one group against another. In founding the United Nations, President Truman reminded us that “it is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength.”
Today, none of us can be satisfied that the lessons of the Holocaust have been adequately learned. Anti-Semitism is again on the rise, and hate is still the dominant force in too many hearts. Too many people still suffer not because of anything they have done, but simply because of who they are.
That is why today is more than a time for reflection. The duty we have is an active one: to confront and defend against those who attack others on the basis of race or religion; unite against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry and sectarian hate; insist on the rule of law in relations among states and between people; and reaffirm our commitment to the fundamental rights and dignity of every human being.
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Original Post:
We are all painfully aware of how the unrelenting and inexorable process of aging is taking from us hundreds of members of that Greatest Generation each and every day. The latest sad statistic provided by the Veterans Administration is that our World War II veterans are dying at a rate of approximately 492 a day. According to the same organization 855,070 World War II veterans are still with us today, out of more than 16 million Americans who served in that war.
Tomorrow, January 27, 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, another tragic statistic will be noted: The rapidly dwindling number of Survivors of the Shoah who are still alive.
Vanessa Gera at the Associated Press observes that, a decade ago, on the 60th Anniversary of the camp’s liberation, 1,500 Holocaust survivors traveled to Auschwitz to mark that occasion. But, she says, “On Tuesday, for the 70th anniversary, organizers are expecting 300, the youngest in their 70s.”
How many Holocaust survivors are still with us today?
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that estimates of the number of remaining survivors vary greatly, depending “in part on how one defines a survivor,” and adds:
The Museum honors as survivors any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, and political policies of the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding.
The Museum’s Registry of Holocaust Survivors currently contains the names of over 195,000 survivors and family members and “we are adding more every day,” the Museum says. But it also adds, “A growing number of these individuals, who registered their names and historical information over the last 15 years, are now deceased.”
The Museum:
The Registry is a voluntary and testimonial list, and is by no means a comprehensive list of all survivors. Furthermore, most of the survivors in our database live in the United States or Canada, although we have registrations from survivors and family members from 59 countries.
Regardless of the exact numbers, all of the Survivors and the more than 1.1 million human beings who were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau will be remembered tomorrow in ceremonies at the former site of the death camp.
“The last of the Survivors who are still alive will be with us on that day. For many of them this seventieth anniversary will be the culmination of their personal victory over despair and oblivion. We would like to spend that day with them,” says 70.auschwitz.org, the organization that is sponsoring the ceremonies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “The memory of the whole world will focus on the tragedy of the Shoah and the cruel system of terror created by Germans in occupied Europe,” it adds.
Many are concerned that the relentless decline in the number of Holocaust Survivors — “as the world moves inevitably closer to a post-survivor era” –may lead to people starting to forget what should never be forgotten.
Some even worry that “the anti-Semitic hatred and violence that are on the rise, particularly in Europe, could partly be linked to fading memories of the Holocaust.”
Let us hope, that even after the last Survivor’s voice is gone, the world will still be listening to the voices of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and of Sobibór, and of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Belzec, and the voices of Louis de Wind and of the other six million Jews on whose behalf we keep proclaiming “Never Again.”
Please watch “The world will be listening to the voices of Auschwitz” below.
It is only 32 seconds long, yet it conveys an eternity of grief.
Lead image and video courtesy of 70.auschwitz.org.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.