Today about twenty thousand people gathered in Poland at the site of a former concentration camp to remember genocide - and how some survived. They heard speeches. Many made a two-mile march, symbolically defiant, from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau camp to honor the six million Jews that died in the Holocaust. This march, the “March of the Living,” coincided with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
While I never knew them, I lost pretty much all of my mother’s parents’ family in the Holocaust (not to mention losing some of my father’s parents’ family). Growing up in an area with a significant population of Jews, I had an education curriculum that included the Holocaust in high school. I am sensitive to the tremendous horror that I first saw graphically in high school, as I watched a black and white movie showing bulldozers moving innumerable, indistinct, emaciated bodies, among other scenes from a concentration camp. The bodies were what remained, in all likelihood, of Jews, Gypsies, gay people and perhaps others the Nazi regime had gathered for extermination.
It seems to me that if “never forget” and “never again” are to have a living meaning, surely their meaning is found in preventing the genocide in Darfur, Sudan that has claimed about 400,000 lives, with an additional 500 per day and many times those numbers in the number of those raped, mutilated and displaced on a daily basis as entire villages are burnt to the ground. All this mass death, injury and destruction is for the lack of about 25,000 troops from all the countries of the world, including the United States. The Bush Administration is now trying to stop America from even modest action - and hedges on whether Darfur is a “genocide.”
On this day of remembrance we can do better. We can start saving lives. We need only act. That, to my mind, would give profound honor those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, and those who survived. We can end this genocide.
Post a Comment