""Yidn,
schreibt!" ["Jews, write it down!"] is what
historian Simon Dubnow reportedly called out to the
remaining Jews in Riga as he was taken to be killed on
Dec. 8, 1941.
On the same day
that Dubnow was shot, Nazi Germany opened the Chelmno
extermination camp for operation, the first of the camps
built especially to murder the Jewish people.
More than four
years later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered
the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last such
camp still functioning. They found 7,000 survivors from
among the more than 1,000,000 people murdered there.
Several days earlier, the camp's Nazi staff had marched
out more than 50,000 inmates in order to prevent them
from falling into Allied hands. Most of these were also
murdered. More than 90% of all these victims, both the
murdered and the survivors, were Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau
was the largest extermination center created by the
Nazis. It has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of
willful radical evil in our time.
These three
events frame much of the Holocaust. When Dubnow called on
the Jews to write it all down, he was calling on them to
leave a record of what happened. That record was to be
studied by future generations, so that what happened
would be known, the Jews remembered, and perhaps
something learned.
When in October
2005 the UN adopted January 27 as the International Day
of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the
Holocaust, it recognized the enduring impact of the
Holocaust on our world. The wounds are still open, the
memories are still raw, and the effects of the Holocaust
have not dimmed. Its shadow looms ever large as the world
continues to struggle to navigate out of the terrible
human potential that the Holocaust bared, towards a
future where humanity has learned how to prevent such
things from recurring. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan
has said, the UN was built largely on the ashes of the
Holocaust.
The Holocaust
shook the very foundations of modern civilization,
calling into question our understanding of humanity
itself. Modern nations were found wanting at best,
murdering at worst. For the first time in modern history,
one nation set out to murder an entire nation, without
leaving behind a single exception. There was to be no
conversion, no assimilation, no pity on the elderly, and
no mercy for the children. The Jews represented for the
Nazis and their collaborators all that they held to be
wrong in this world, such as the concept of human
equality, based on the belief that all human beings are
created in God's image.
Murdering all
the Jews meant murdering modern civilization, in order to
replace with a Nazi racist, antisemitic, totalitarian,
and brutal vision of the world. And parallel to the
millions of human beings who were to disappear off the
face of the Earth simply because they had a Jewish
background, many other people who were undesirable in the
Nazis' eyes were to be persecuted, enslaved, or
murdered.
The awakening of
the UN to Holocaust commemoration is an important step in
heightening awareness of the Holocaust and of its
devastating impact on the world. More than sixty years
since the Holocaust, we still wonder what the world has
learned. This year we can say perhaps that the world has
learned to remember, and in remembrance of the particular
event -- the murder of the Jews -- we can address the
universal implications -- the challenge posed to modern
civilization. Only in remembering and learning the past
can we hope to secure the future.
The next step is
securing remembrance and infusing it with content. What
do we remember? What do we want collectively to prevent?
For the State of Israel, where remembrance of the
Holocaust is marked annually on the 27th of Nissan, Yom
Hashoah, January 27 should become an annual day of study
of a particular subject relating to the Holocaust.
Dubnow's call to Jews then to write it all down was also
a call for us to study the event, and hopefully to learn
to prevent its recurrence. January 27 should be devoted
annually to a theme that will be studied in schools and
addressed in public forums. In 2006, the International
Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the
Holocaust should address a basic issue -- clarifying the
definition of the Holocaust in a comparative analysis
with genocide and related events in modern history. In
this way, we will examine just what we are remembering,
and what it is that we should strive to
prevent.
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