International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, marked 75 years since the Russian Army liberated the notorious Auschwitz Death Camp in Poland. There were only about 20,000 people left alive in Auschwitz to be liberated. Over 1,500,000, mostly Jews, had been murdered by gas, brutalization, and horrors unspeakable, committed by the German Nazis and their assorted sympathetic allies to racial genocide. A few thousand more, those still able to walk, were forced out on Death Marches by the retreating Germans.
On the Northern Coast of South America, is a tiny third world country’s capital, Paramaribo, Suriname. It is 5,248 miles to Krakow, near Auschwitz. The tiny Jewish community of Suriname, alongside of their non-Jewish neighbors chose on Jan. 27 to remember the Holocaust.
Unlike most commemorations that took place that day, the Suriname Jewish community dedicated a permanent interpretive historical marker telling the ill-informed and the future generations of the uninformed, what the Holocaust was.
Five years earlier, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation (JASHP) was given the special opportunity to help by providing key funding for the construction of Suriname’s Holocaust Memorial. The 350-year-old Surinamese Jewish community was nearly mortally wounded when a very large number of their members were trapped in Holland during the Holocaust. The Germans murdered almost every Surinamese Jew they had gotten their hands on.
The magnificent rectangular obelisk, with the names of the Surinamese victims carved in gold letters around three sides, was dedicated in 2016. The Memorial is located adjacent to the magnificent Neve Shalom synagogue, whose roots trace back to 1716 at that site.
In just the few years since the dedication, JASHP realized that fewer and fewer visitors who came to see Paramaribo, the World Heritage site, knew what the Holocaust was. Jews come as well. Too many of the Jews too are challenged to say what was the Holocaust.
JASHP offered significant funding to the Jewish community in Suriname for a permanent historical interpretive marker to be added to the Memorial. In afew words, the marker would explain what the Holocaust was. The funding was more than what was needed for the marker. The balance went to synagogue maintenance and to cemetery restoration.
In the tropical environment of Suriname, poor Jews had been buried with wooden grave markers. Many of markers had disintegrated. The memory of the people who lived has almost vanished.
JASHP’s offer was accepted. Needed physical repairs were initiated. More significantly, the Suriname Jewish community placed aluminum markers preserving the resting places of those who passed so long ago, those with no memory to be seen.
January 27, 2020, at the 75th anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new black granite interpretive memorial, carved in gold lettering, was dedicated next to the Surinamese Holocaust Memorial.
Before a dignified crowd of Surinamese and visitors, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and those with different paths, the historical interpretive marker was dedicated.
The 42 words of text are written in English and Dutch. “This monument is in remembrance to the Surinamese Jewish men, women and children who were murdered in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews in the years of 1939-1945 by the Nazi government of Germany and its collaborators.”
In the front row of the ceremony sat four elderly gentlemen. They were Surinamese veterans of the war against the Nazis. They proudly wore the medals of distinction they had earned so long-ago during World War II. Together they stood and faced the newly unveiled historical marker. At attention, with clearly visible feeling, they saluted, respecting the Jewish Holocaust and the meaning of the past they fought to rid the world of.
The veterans had risked their all, not just for Jews. They risked their lives to end the tyranny of bigotry, hatred and death.
Trees of life are being planted in Israel in honor of each of the gentlemen. A JNF certificate will be presented to each man in appreciation by the Jewish community of Suriname in the name of all humanity, forever.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World
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Jerry Klinger is President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. www.JASHP.org