Under guard, Jewish men, women, and children board trains during deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp. Siedlce, Poland, August 1942. (Yad Vashem photo archives)
By Katalin Fay Mouyal, Shady Grove Library
Sixty plus years later…and the collective memory fades about the horrors of the Holocaust, which took place in Europe during WWII. Calls for denial of the Holocaust from certain leaders and so-called scholars are in the news. Denying history and the official records, some politicians hostile to Israel and to the Jewish people organize conferences to reverse or re-write history. Recently in the U.K. some schools stopped teaching the history of the Holocaust for fear of protest from their Muslim populations. Are we going to forget and repeat history? Will the new generations of Europe and the world be taught the hard facts, or the diluted version of them? The recently elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, decided to take a strong position on this issue at his press conference:
“Denying historical facts, especially on such an important subject as the Holocaust, is just not acceptable. Nor is it acceptable to call for the elimination of any State or people. I would like to see this fundamental principle respected both in rhetoric and in practice by all the members of the international community.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,
Press Conference SG/2120, 14 December 2006
http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/emainpage.shtml
Under guard, Jewish men, women, and children board trains during deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp. Siedlce, Poland, August 1942. (Yad Vashem photo archives)
A transport of families arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Poland. May 1944 (Yad Vashem photo archives)
German soldiers lead families of Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising to the assembly point for deportation. Poland, May 1943.
What about similar horrors, mass-murders of civilians in recent and current times, such as in Sudan, in Chechnya, in the Balkans and in Rwanda? The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has a web site called “The Committee on Conscience,” which brings to attention atrocities committed in our times, taking place all over the world.
http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/
“The Committee on Conscience regularly hosts presentations related to the prevention and punishment of genocide. In lectures, panel discussions, films, and interviews, analysts offer expert insight into the places where genocide has occurred and the questions of how to prevent and punish it.”
On its web page “Bearing Witness” – to different troubled spots in the world today (Sudan, Darfur, etc.) – the museum brings awareness, education, presentations related to preventions of and punishment of genocide in our times. There are weekly podcasts and lectures online at http://blogs.ushmm.org/index.php. The pages offer panel discussions, documentation, films and analysis from experts, insight into the background and the places where these events have occurred in recent times, or are occurring as we speak.
In April, Shady Grove Library arranged a well thought out visual and informational display to the memory of the Holocaust and genocide in our time. Captions and illustrations of historical events, stories, original photographs from the deportations, concentrations camps, and data were exhibited. In a different display case, we featured images, posters of Darfur, photographs taken in Chechnya, Sudan and the Balkans (downloaded from the USHMM).
Darfur Poster 1 (PDF)
Darfur Poster 2 (PDF)
Find more information about the massacres in Eastern Bosnia, and the widespread attacks on civilians in Sudan’s western region of Darfur that led the Committee to issue Genocide Emergency warnings in 2004. See the beautifully photographed Darfur poster series available for print on their web page:
http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details.php?content=2006-02-28&menupage=Sudan
The committee’s concern about Chechnya since 1999 stems from the ongoing level of violence directed against civilians by the Russian army. There is a continuing war of attrition since 2000. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Chechnya pacified in the year 2000.
Education, collection of evidence and being witness to the crimes against humanity are the only safeguard against atrocities such as the Holocaust, never to happen again in our lifetime and in our children’s children’s lifetime.