Remembering To Never Forget

" Those who do not learn from the past, are destined to repeat it."

Such a true quote! A week ago was Holocaust Memorial Day. What was the Holocaust you may ask.

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"),^[2] also known as The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "calamity"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban,^[3] from the Hebrew for "destruction").

It was a time when millions were tortured and killed just for who they were.

Some friends and I went on the March For Remembrance in honor of those who perished during the Holocaust. The event was very well organized. There were memorial candles lit . There were stones and on each was the name of someone lost during this horrific time. There were quotes , poems and stories written by survivors and family members of victims. There were prayers recited.
Before the march began, each of us took a stone with a name on it and walked it across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and at the other end left it on a makeshift headstone and walked back. While we were walking , the leader of the event and a few others remained behind reading names of those who did not survive this atrocious ordeal. In the time it took us to walk 2 miles, they had only made it through 350 names. I tried to fathom the time it would take to read the names of the over 6,000,000 and I could not imagine it, other than it would probably take days, maybe even weeks.
Why is it so important for us to "Never Forget" you may ask. Maybe you think to yourself that an event such as that may never happen again, or perhaps you think yourself safe because you're not Jewish.
Let me help you rethink this. I'll start with a question. How do you boil a frog? You gradually heat the water for if you were to put the frog in a scalding pot he would surely jump out.
This is the same thing Hitler did. He didn't start with his grand scale attack right off the bat. He started gradually with ideas others easily grabbed onto. Over time, his concept grew more and more radical and by then his forces were too large for those who were his target to combat, even those who opposed his ideas felt helpless to fight against it.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various legislation to remove the Jews from civil society, predominantly the Nuremberg Laws, was enacted in Nazi Germany years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease.

So, you're still thinking it wouldn't have affected you because you're not Jewish? Let me enlighten you a bit...

Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' genocide of millions of people in other groups, including Romani (more commonly known in English by the exonym "Gypsies"), Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses and other political and religious opponents, which occurred regardless of whether they were of German or non-German ethnic origin.^[6] Using this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 million and 17 million people.

Is this a little eye opening for you? It also included Democrats, Union Socialists, Freemasons,political enemies, those to weak to work. Also remember, disabilities aren't just physical, those with emotional disabilities were fair game as well.

So , who would ever help such an evil man as Hitler ? Who would help evil prevail?

Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag (IBM Germany) company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators ... Germany's greatest achievement."

Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews." He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.

Surely , you would think, Christians would never be a part of something like this. Think again. They even funded Hitler's movement!


Maybe you're thinking, "well, extermination was at least quick". Re-think that too. They were not just killed. They were used in horrible experiments which I will not go into detail about, but that you can read about on your own.

I can remember in school, being shown the films, books, and information about the Holocaust, and sitting there in shock looking at the mass graves, wondering , " Why didn't anyone stop them sooner?"  " How could this happen?"

The answer...Two things..

1. "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".

Indifference is a very dangerous thing! Too many didn't care as long as it didn't touch them. To not take a side, is to take a side. We must every day choose to do good. We must fight against injustice when we see a wrong being committed. We MUST be the voice for those who do not have their own, or don't have the strength to use it. We must carry one another's burdens and fight each others causes, or we will fall victim to the same sorts of evil that prevailed during the Holocaust!

So many of the Jewish people who were confined to camps, had such a will to live, to survive this evil.

In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."

– Martin Gilbert. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy

Let this cause us to take time and reflect. Have any of us been witness to a wrong that we personally did nothing to stop? Have we wondered what to do , and did nothing because we couldn't find the right answer?

2. "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."

I say, to do something and be slightly wrong in approach , is better than doing nothing to stop injustice, unrighteousness and evil.


Let each of us , ever day


Remember To Never Forget. In forgetting, you may lose yourself or a loved one.