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Yom Hashoah Commemoration April 16, 2007

Once again, we open up the Siphrey Hashoah to sift through its bloodstained pages – it is August 11, 1942, the diary of Hillel Seidman says:

“Today, they deported the orphanages”, he writes, “Janusz Korczak was famous throughout Poland and beyond –

Today he was ordered to ‘vacate’ the orphanage. Korczak himself could really stay, since doctors are considered essential, but Korczak refuses to save himself alone. He cannot bear to leave his orphans....

All the children assemble in front of the orphanage in Sliska Street – so many children, and though they are starved and weak they remain disciplined and well behaved. Some carry small packs while others clutch textbooks or notepads under their arms. Here and there a silent tear rolls down a famished cheek....

The column begins to move, many sense this is their final journey. Who knows how much potential, skill, talent ... are contained within these precious young souls....

At their head marches Janusz Korczak – the symbol of selfless love and charity overwhelmed by the cruel and evil enemy who knows no mercy. Humanity has been beaten by the beast of prey.”

It was years later that we stood on the grounds of Theresienstadt Concentration camp with Irma Lauscher – who was one of the teachers deported there. She took us into the courtyard and put her hand on a tree and told us this story: When the children were here, I tried to take their minds off the tragedy that befell them – that they were separated from their loved ones, their parents, and had come to this place with nothing. I told them we were going to have a ceremony - we were going to plant a tree. We gathered in the courtyard and I told them a story about trees. We sang a song and I promised them that when the tree matures we would all meet here again – just as we’re now holding this ceremony to plant it. But you see, she looked at us, touching the 25 foot tree, I did not tell them the truth – there is no one here but their elderly teacher – most of my students were all gassed she concluded.

We remember those young children today - along with all those who found themselves where the sun never shone, where the stars never glitter - the untold millions whose wagons once cluttered the marketplaces of Lemburg and Tarnopol…whose books once lined the academies of Lublin and Slobadka… whose cheders overflowed with the excited voices of children.

My friends, let us also remember how bold and resilient evil is – how often it adapts itself to new situations. Yesterday, the symbol of inhumanity were goose stepping black boots, but today, it is the suicide belts worn by international terrorists whose vocation in life is to murder innocent civilians - woman and children - wherever they can find them.

It is this very issue that I raised with Pope Benedict XVI a little more than a year ago. I said in my remarks that in our time, the greatest threat to mankind comes not from secularists and atheists, but from religious fanatics who inspire terrorists to murder innocent people and promise them a place of honor at God’s table.

Even Nazis, the quintessential murderers of all time, never embraced a culture of death that prefers the next world to this one. The most sadistic Nazi murderers did everything possible to preserve their lives. Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's “Final Solution”, lived a life of an ordinary laborer in Argentina. Mengele, the infamous 'Angel of Death', lived in dingy apartments in Brazil. Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, regularly changed locations in an attempt to avoid the hangman's noose.

But Mohammed Atta, the chief suicide terrorist of 9/11, couldn’t wait to blow up a plane so that he could garner for himself a place of honor at God's table in paradise. This reverence for death is a defamation of God, who commanded us to “choose life.”

It is so sad, my friends, 60 years after Auschwitz, that the President of Iran calls the Holocaust a myth, so sad. At a University of Haifa poll conducted by a prominent socialist, 33% of Israeli-Arab high school and college graduates believe the Holocaust never happened.

To these revisionists and haters, on the occasion of this annual Holocaust memorial day, we say the survivors of the Holocaust lost their entire families, had no homes to return to, found few countries willing to accept them. Yet, despite this, they picked themselves up, married, had children - taught them to love and not to hate, taught them how to dignify the world rather than destroy it, taught them how to rebuild communities rather than demean them. These are the people worth emulating and honoring.

One final word, there is a famous photograph taken in the Lodz Ghetto in 1943. The photograph depicts young boys aged 18, 19, and 20, who had come home from a full day’s work in the forced labor battalions. Each of them wore the yellow star on their sleeve.

The photograph depicts a secret celebration of Simchat Torah. It shows all these young men, smiling and dancing with the one Torah that they had managed to hide. What was unique about this photograph is that it was not taken by the Nazis but by the Jews themselves and that every one of the young men in the photo is smiling. I wondered what was there to smile about. Their future was doomed, in a matter of a few weeks they would all be dead. The answer is they were smiling at us – sending us an email saying to us that the principals of freedom and human dignity represented by this Torah would outlive the Nazis. They were telling us long after Hitler, Stalin and Ahmadinijad – long after they’re all gone, people will still dance with the Torah – still be able to say Am Yisrael Chai!

For more information on this issue, go to www.wiesenthal.com