International Holocaust Remembrance Day: To Remember, To Act

"So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn't function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher. So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived, January 27, I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated. This was my, my survival chance."
- BART STERN

On this day in 1945, Soviet forces liberated the most notorious of Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered during the course of the Holocaust.

In a very eloquent piece on JPost.com, former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Colter writes of the lessons to be learned from the horrors of the Holocaust, first and foremost of which is the importance of remembrance, in its own right:

"For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of
the Holocaust - first defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide, then murdered - we have to understand that the mass murder of millions is not a matter of abstract statistics. For unto each person there is a name - unto each person there is an identity. Each person is a universe. As both the Talmud and Koran teach us, whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe - just as whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have destroyed an entire universe. And so the abiding imperative: that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny."

But as Colter continues, the importance of remembrance does merely rest in the somber recognition of each life lost --- recognition and remembrance are insulted by our inaction in the face of on-going genocide and mass atrocity:

"We should reaffirm today that never again will we be indifferent to racism and hate; that never again will we be silent in the face of evil; that never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable; that never again will we acquiesce in the face of mass atrocity and impunity. We will speak and we will act against racism, against hate, against anti-Semitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice - and against the crime whose name we should shudder even to mention: genocide.

May this day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but a reminder to act, which it must be."

It is with one foot in the past that we must look to the present, and to the future --- it is through remembrance that we must be motivated act. This is why I refuse to be silent in the face of genocide: Because each person is a universe, and to be silent in the face of destruction is to be complicit.

"The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict."  --- Dr. Martin Luther King

[Photo: A man searches for names on a memorial wall, which identifies tens of thousands of Hungarian Holocaust victims in the Holocaust Memorial Center, housed in a former synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Jan. 26, 2009. Tuesday is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is designated by the United Nations General Assembly to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.]