January 27, 2023 is International Holocaust Rememberance Day. It commemorates the day in 1945 when the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated.
The largest of the death camps where about 1,000,000 Jews were murdered, Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a labor camp and a center for the rapid murder of Jews by means of Zyklon B gas. It was equipped with several extermination facilities and crematoria.
….
The Auschwitz camp complex was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945. Tragically, by then approximately 1,000,000 Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma, and some 15,000 prisoners of war from the USSR and other countries had been murdered at Auschwitz.
www.yadvashem.org/...
Unlike her mother, brother and sister, Lily Ebert survived the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
After the camp was liberated, Ebert made a promise to herself: She would tell people what had happened there and, in doing so, change the world.
Now, at 98, Ebert is keeping that promise in a way no one could have imagined in 1945. With the help of her 18-year-old great-grandson, Dov Forman, Ebert is telling her story to millions of people on TikTok. Since their inaugural video on Feb. 9 last year, the two have posted more than 380 videos on the social media app, drawing in 1.7 million followers and amassing some 25 million likes in the process.
wapo.st/...
What to Read on Holocaust Remembrance Day
I thought I would share some recommended reading for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed today. My hope is that these selections will help you cut through the overwhelming amount of material available, and give you something more digestible than a history book but more substantive than a movie.
….
The Man Who Saved My Grandfather
Thousands of Jews were rescued from the Nazis by a Japanese diplomat named Chiune Sugihara, who went against the orders of his German-allied government to issue thousands of transit visas to desperate yeshiva students.
,,,,
How to Explain the Holocaust in One Simple Statistic
In discussions of the Holocaust, the numbers sometimes seem numbing. Two out of every three European Jews were murdered in the genocide. ….So many Jews were killed by the Nazis that the global Jewish population is still lower today than it was in 1939.
….
How Not to Talk About the Holocaust
Is it ever appropriate to compare something to the Holocaust? How should we balance the Nazi genocide’s particular lessons about anti-Jewish prejudice with its universal lessons about bigotry toward all? On social media, you will often find very bad answers to these questions. In this essay, I tried to offer better ones.
….
The Good News About the Holocaust (Education) in America
One depressing Holocaust Memorial Day tradition is the release of polling showing how little younger generations seem to know about the Nazi genocide. But is that really the full story?
Americans demonstrate greater literacy about the Holocaust—an event that happened to a tiny fraction of the world’s population on a completely different continent—than they do about their own country’s institutions and history. More Americans can identify Auschwitz than their own branches of government.
newsletters.theatlantic.com/...
I was about 12 or 13 when my family toured the site of the Dachau concentration camp. It was a life changing experience, and probably contributed greatly to my values and politics today, decades later.