Given that the Jewish people had two days for marking the Shoah – the 10th of Tevet as the Yom Kaddish Klali with its deep personal, religious significance, and the 27th of Nissan as the day of remembrance of the victims and fighters of the Shoah who died only because they were Jews – why did the United Nations find it necessary to pass a resolution on November 1, 2005, establishing January 27 as an official day of commemorating the Holocaust, designating it as Holocaust Memorial Day?
It took the world 60 years to come to terms with its conscience and face up to the most extraordinary annihilation process ever undertaken – and to which it was a silent bystander and witness. Nevertheless, the United Nations resolution is a laudable document. It rejects denial of the Holocaust. It declares that every member nation has an obligation to honor the memory of Holocaust victims and develop educational programs as part of the resolve to help prevent future acts of genocide.
At the UN session in which the resolution was debated, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer remarked: “At a time when the last personal witnesses of the Holocaust are leaving us, it is especially important to find new ways to keep the fate of the victims alive in the memory of the world – and to keep on asking how such crimes could ever be committed.”
At the same time, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad termed the Holocaust a “myth” while Egypt’s UN envoy, Majed Abdelaziz, offered, “We believe no one should have the monopoly on suffering.”
The UN Resolution makes no mention of the torture, pain or suffering of the Jewish people as a result of the world standing idly by, but it does emphasize that it wishes to honor “the courage and dedication shown by the soldiers who liberated the concentration camps.”
The last clause is no doubt directly linked to the deliberate choice of the date, January 27, for the commemoration. For on January 27, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, the greatest of the extermination camps in which one million four hundred thousand Jews perished.
It would appear that the nations of the world were more anxious to demonstrate to future generations the readiness, courage and dedication of their soldiers in liberating the camps than in portraying what actually transpired within the camps.
The Jewish date for Yom Hashoah has a very different slant to it.
It is generally assumed that the April date for Yom Hashoah, as set by the Knesset, marks the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. This is an incorrect assumption. The revolt actually started on January 18, 1943.
Gerald Reitlinger describes the following situation within the Ghetto: On that day “a miserable column of deportees started to march down Niska Street, but at the junction of Zamenhova Street several of them pulled out firearms and shut at the SS and militia…. For three days a house-to-house round-up was conducted. In the northeast corner of the Ghetto four of the fifty Jewish combat groups barricaded themselves and after four days (German commander) von Sammern had to use two field guns to pound up the buildings.”
Von Sammern decided to call off the action that took the lives of 20 German soldiers and wounded 50.
The full-scale revolt exploded on erev Pesach, April 19, 1943. While one of the favorite tactics of the Germans was to exploit Jewish festivals for their murderous actions (in the ghetto of Minsk, for example, they drowned 5,000 children in a big pit of lime on Purim), the real cause of the Warsaw Revolt was not of German choice. It was the Jewish remnant that reacted in the spirit of Pesach. The Yiddish poet Binem Heller wrote:
Pesach has come to the Ghetto again,
And neighbor to neighbor the battle-pledge gives;
The blood of the German will flow in the Ghetto
So long as one Jew in the Ghetto still lives!
In face of the nazi – no fear, no subjection….
German attacks were unrelenting. But Pesach came to remind us of our age-old aspirations for freedom. Religious, irreligious and anti-religious, all sensed the call originating in ancient Egypt and knew that this was the moment of destiny, of standing up to evil and madly resisting.