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| Congressman Tom Lantos survivor of the Holocaust |
"The veneer of civilization is paper thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest," said President Joe Biden in his statement issued today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
He was quoting his friend, Congressman Tom Lantos (1928-2008) of San Mateo CA, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress.
President Biden described the sources of his deep commitment to "never again":
I first learned about the horrors of the Holocaust listening to my father at the dinner table. The passion he felt that we should have done more to prevent the Nazi campaign of systematic mass murder has stayed with me my entire life. It’s why I took my children to visit Dachau in Germany, and why I hope to do the same for each of my grandchildren — so they too would see for themselves the millions of futures stolen away by unchecked hatred and understand in their bones what can happen when people turn their heads and fail to act.
He continued:
The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president. ...The Holocaust was no accident of history. It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity.
Antony J. Blinken also spoke out today, his first day as Secretary of State, remembering his step-father, a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family and spent almost four years in labor and death camps. In fact, Samuel Pisar, "was one of 900 children in his school in Bialystok, Poland, but the only one to survive the Holocaust after four years in concentration camps."
"He taught me that evil on a grand scale can and does happen in our world, and that we have a responsibility to do everything we can to stop it," said Secretary Blinken.
Listen to his 2-minute video on YouTube:
It's no accident that people who seek to create instability and undermine democracy often try to cast doubt on the Holocaust.... They want to blur the line between truth and lies. They want to use disinformation and conspiracy theories to gain power, and they want to provoke hate... Every day that I serve as Secretary of State... I will remember that atrocities like the Holocaust don't just happen. They're allowed to happen. It's up to us to stop it. Never again.
Secretary Blinken gave a fuller description of his family's stories last November when he was introduced as Biden's choice for Secretary of State.
Thank you to Lawrence O'Donnell who quoted both President Biden and Secretary Blinken on The Last Word today. He noted that when the first American soldier entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found 7,000 prisoners still alive--but they also found 44,000 pairs of shoes. Over 1 million people were executed there.
In the 1950s we didn't have International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
We had Anne Frank's Diary, which appeared in English in 1952 after first appearing in 1947 in Dutch.
I was in elementary school during the fifties, and the Holocaust was not part of the curriculum, nor did it come up in My Weekly Reader, the little newspaper we read aloud in class from second grade on. It was actually one sheet, folded in half and then opened like a book or tabloid.
We certainly did not cover World War II in our history lessons. In fact, we didn't go much beyond Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln.
But we had the first-person testimony of Anne Frank. By 1959 a film appeared basednon her diary--the first Holocaust film made in the US.
The next time I remember hearing about the Holocaust was when Adolf Eichmann was on trial for being one of the major organizers of transporting and executing 6 million Jews and about 5 million others. Every night in 1961, from April through December, my watched news reports of the trial in Jerusalem on our black-and-white television. It was eerie to watch as he sat in a protective plastic box. He was hung in Israel in 1962, the only execution ever allowed by that nation.
By 2005 the UN decided that a remembrance day was needed, and they chose January 27, the day the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated in 1945.
Today, on January 27, 2021, we need Holocaust Remembrance Day more than ever. During the armed attack on the US Capitol by white supremacists and anti-Semites, there were some with abhorrent t-shirts saying "Camp Auschwitz" or "6MWNE" (six million was not enough).
Is it possible to give these people some kind of access to the reality of Auschwitz, enough to change their minds? A tour? A night spent naked alone in one of the gas chambers?
Or are these people's brains so polluted that they have become human waste, not fit for anything but a jail cell?
Lock them up. Lock up as many of these armed attackers as possible and for as long as possible.
Allow them no reading material or video time--except for the stories of those who died in the Shoah and those who survived it.
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Thank you to Vanessa Gera of the Associated Press for reporting from Warsaw on this day, 76 years after US troops liberated Auschwitz.
