In Liberty State Park, there stands a 15-foot high bronze statue of a World War II soldier carrying a body. That limp body being cradled in the arm of the soldier is not that of a fallen comrade, but depicts the rescue of a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp. The shirt of that survivor shows a patch cut in the shape of the Star of David, indicating Jewish identity The statue is “a testament to the Americans who liberated the camps, and a memorial to those who perished.” It is titled “Liberation.” It is also a grim reminder of Shoah — the Holocaust.
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as designated by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/7, November 2005. The date marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by allied forces.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the tragedy that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 6 million Jews, 200,000 Romani gypsies, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people and over 9,000 homosexuals, by the Nazi regime during the period of 1933 and 1945.
Mao Zedong, the leader of China, had killed 49 million people outright, or by starvation, or forced labor. Russia’s leader, Stalin, killed 25 million of his own people in a similar fashion. So, what sets the Holocaust apart from these other events?
The Holocaust was a systematic, deliberate attempt to exterminate a segment of society that Hitler and the Nazi party deemed not worthy of living. It was not because these people were a threat to the Nazi regime, nor was there any political or economic justification for their elimination. It was an intentional mass slaughter, organized by the state, against certain members of society and defenseless civilians, just for the crime of existing. The Nazis made a deliberate genocidal attempt at annihilating every member of a specific group — the Jews. As Jewish author, Emil Fackenheim, stated, “It was not a means to an end; it was an end in itself.” The gas chambers became the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” and provided a horrific and efficient way of committing mass murder.
The movement by Hitler and the Nazi regime to eliminate the Jewish population was well planned, organized and determined. It started with discrimination, taking away their civil rights, destroying their businesses, forcing them into ghettos, all calculated to destroy the Jewish community. Although there were pockets of resistance, the juggernaut of evil was so overwhelming it finally led to the slaughter of millions of innocent people. Two-thirds of the European Jewish population would be put to death or imprisoned waiting to die.
As we remember the Holocaust this January 27, the question becomes, can such a thing happen again? Sadly, the answer is yes, and it is happening now. It might not be on the grand scale of the Holocaust, but there are countries around the world in which mass killings continue by the tens of thousands. Man’s inhumanity to man continues.
As Simon Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer, correctly stated, “ The Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, it was a human tragedy.”
Carl J. Asszony of Piscataway is a member of the Veterans Advisory Council at the VA Medical Center, Lyons. njveteran30@gmail.com
Creative Commons Liberation, Liberty State Park, New Jersey” by Ken Lundl is licensed under CC BY 2.0