APRIL 26, 2022 – Fifteen-year-old Elie wasn’t afraid of anything. He wasn’t afraid when the Nazis occupied Romania where he and his family lived. He wasn’t afraid when his family was forced to relocate to a ghetto near the town of Sighet (now Sighetu Marmatiei).
Even, in May 1944, when, under German pressure, Romanian authorities began rounding up the Jews in the ghettos, to include his family, he wasn’t afraid.
“I wasn’t worried,” said Elie Wiesel in an interview with CNN shortly before his death in 2016. “We had no idea Auschwitz existed.”
However, once he and hundreds of other Jews were packed into cattle cars for their trip to Poland, Elie knew something terrible was happening, and he began to be afraid.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz concentration camp, Elie lied to the guards and told them he was 18 years old. This lie meant he was marked for work – not for death.
This lie saved his life, as 90% of the people from his ghetto, including his mother and one of his sisters, were killed upon arrival at Auschwitz.
Later on, Elie, and his father Shlomo, were transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. His father died weeks before the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the U.S. Third Army.
Elie Wiesel would survive the horrors of the camp and go on to become a writer, professor, political activist and Nobel laureate.
Every April, the United States remembers Elie’s story, as well as the stories of the other 11 million victims of Nazi atrocities, during Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Yom HaShoah is observed in April because it is the month that the majority of the camps were liberated by the Allied armies, and because it remembers the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on April 19, 1943.
This year, Remembrance Day will be on April 28. However, that entire week, April 24-May 1, will be observed as the Holocaust Days of Remembrance.
The Holocaust was the Nazi regime’s state-sponsored mass persecution and murder of millions of people viewed as biologically or racially inferior.
The theme for this year is: Determination, Hope and Honor.
As the survivors and the liberators of the camps die, it becomes easier and easier for successive generations to forget what happened.
In a survey done two years ago by NBC News, 23% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 believe that the Holocaust was either a myth, or the number of people killed had been greatly exaggerated. Almost half of the respondents couldn’t name even one of the nearly 40,000 camps or ghettos.
Even more worrisome, according to an article posted on NBC News on Sept. 16, 2020, is that due to social media, over half of Americans under 40 have seen Holocaust denial posts online, and Nazi symbols in their community over the last five years.
This is alarming. As decades pass one into the next, we as a society are getting further and further removed from the horrors of the Holocaust. It becomes easier to forget.
We are also seeing a rise of anti-Semitism and hate crimes both at home and in Europe.
“There is no doubt that Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University in a Sept. 16, 2020, interview with NBC News. “And when we fail to actively remember the facts of what happened, we risk a situation where prejudice and anti-Semitism will encroach on those facts.”
To fight this trend, and ensure that people like Elie don’t have to endure the unendurable again, we as a people must acknowledge what happened, preserve the stories, and the memories of those that died and survived.
To do this we must learn from the past, even though it is painful, and ask why this happened, and prevent it from happening again.
“Remembrance is our eternal duty, but remembrance without action risks becoming an empty ritual,” said President Joe Biden in this year’s Proclamation of Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust 2022.
To ensure that the stories of the survivors didn’t die with them, organizations like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmn.org) and the Jewish Telegraph Agency (www.jta.org) have collected the stories of the survivors and made them available to view online.
Other organizations, like the Claims Conference, is trying to fight Holocaust denial online with their #NoDenyingIt digital campaign. One of the issues they are running into is that Facebook’s Community Standards do not consider Holocaust denial a form of hate speech.
The USHMN is also a valuable resource for teachers and parents who want to teach their children about the Holocaust.
It is through teaching and learning that we can hope this doesn’t happen again.
“As a teacher I always believe in questions, the question is, ‘Will the world ever learn?’” said Wiesel.
Story by Sgt. 1st Class Corinna Baltos
U.S. Army Sustainment Command