Heads of state across Europe commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day as people throughout the continent resolved to never let the nightmares of World War II happen again.
In Berlin, Israeli President Shimon Peres joined his German counterpart Horst Kohler for a prayer service and memorial at the city’s notorious Track 17, here Jews boarded trains for the concentration camps.
Rabbi Yehuda Tiechtel, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Berlin, presided over the service, leading a recitation of Psalms in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
“It was a very unique and memorable tribute,” said Tiechtel. “Holocaust survivors and German and Israeli youths lit candles, with Presidents Peres and Kohler lighting the last candle together.”
The following day, Peres addressed the German Parliament, telling the legislative body in Hebrew that as a young boy, he boarded a train to the Holy Land to escape his Belarus hometown and advancing Nazi troops. His last memory of his grandfather was when the old man said goodbye.
“I remember his last words to me,” said Peres, according to an account in The Guardian. “ ‘My boy, always stay a Jew.’ The locomotive whistled and the train pulled away. It was the last time that I saw him.”
When they marched into Wiszniewo, said the president, the Nazis herded the town’s Jews into the local synagogue before setting it alight.
Holocaust Remembrance Day, fixed by the United Nations to be observed every Jan. 27, “not only represents a memorial day for the victims,” said Peres, “not only the pangs of conscience of humankind in the face of the incomprehensible atrocity that took place, but also of the tragedy that derived from the procrastination in taking action.”
Combating Denial
As at memorials throughout European cities, conversations and events in London and Moscow also focused on the importance of Holocaust education to combat continuing anti-Semitism.
According to the Ilford Recorder, Londoners crowded into the Holocaust Memorial Gardens in Valentines Park Wednesday to listen the account of 83-year-old survivor Issy Hahn, who endured life in a ghetto and six concentration camps.
Rabbi Aryeh Sufrin, executive director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Centres of N.E. London and Essex, announced that every school in the area should be represented at such memorials.
“Everyone should be able to walk away from here and do a good deed,” he said, “educate, teach and share the experiences they have learned about here today.”
In Russia, meanwhile, a meeting between Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the Volga River port of Cheboksary highlighted efforts by the Federation of Jewish Communities to reach out to Jewish survivors and veterans of World War II through communal soup kitchens and medical centers.
According to attendees of the meeting, Lazar updated Putin on the construction of Moscow’s Jewish museum, while the prime minister spoke out against Holocaust denial.
“I am following very closely what is happening in the world, especially the problems associated with the distortion of history and the denial of the Holocaust,” said Putin. “Let me say that, certainly in regard to preserving the memory of the victims of [the Nazis] and in regard to the preservation of information about the genuinely tragic events of World War II, Jewish organizations have always been our staunch ally.”
Start a Discussion