Yom Hashoah

On Tuesday of this week was Yom Hashoah – the national day of remembrance for the Holocaust. To commemorate the day, Israelis observe 2 minutes of silence and many remembrance ceremonies are held. I was invited to attend a Yom Hashoah ceremony where a friend of my family here, a remarkable woman named Ruth Brant, delivered a talk on her experiences as a survivor of Auschwitz (the Nazi death camp where between 1.1 and 1.7 million people were killed – mostly Jews, but also homosexuals, Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners). I feel it important to share some of her experiences with you all now.

Ruth grew up in a small village an area that was traded between Romania and Hungary for most of its history. As Ruth described it, by the time the Nazis arrived in the area of Eastern Hungary (as it was then), the Nazi extermination of the Jews was running like a well-oiled machine. Ruth described how first all the Jewish men, and then all the women and children were rounded up in the town square and then loaded onto the cattle cars that would take most of them to their deaths. Ruth explained how there were hundreds of people crammed into each car, so that there wasn’t room to even sit down. There was no toilet – they were given a bucket to relieve themselves in. Many people didn’t make it through the journey.

Then they arrived in Auschwitz. The people were unloaded form the trains, and stripped of all their belongings. They were forced to file past Dr. Mengele, who separated those who he thought seemed fit to work and those who would go to the gas chambers. This was the last time Ruth Brant saw her family. Ruth, then a healthy 16-year-old girl was spared. Her family was not.

As Ruth told the crowd about her experiences in the camp (the cramped living conditions, the starvation, the dehumanization) no one dared make a sound. I was struck by the power of her attitude. Throughout all her ordeals, she never lost the will to live. She explains that she made a pact with God that if he let her live, she would promise to tell the story of what had occurred in the camp. She told the story of how, after her arm was tattooed by the Nazi soldiers, she looked at her number and had hope when she saw that it ended with the number 18. This number has significance in Judaism, because in Hebrew, the number 18 is represented by the two Hebrew letters that spell “chai” – life.

After liberation by the allies in early 1945, Ruth went to live in the US and eventually moved to Israel after the 6-Day war in 1967. Ruth now often speaks to groups at Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust museum) and is a frequent speaker at schools and remembrance ceremonies. Ruth has visited the site of Aucschwitz-Birkenau 12 times now, but she mentioned that the most special return to Auschwitz was her 10th visit back, which she made accompanied by 200 officers in the Israeli Air Force. To her, it was the ultimate response to the Nazi atrocities- to return to the site of her people’s suffering surrounded by the strength of the Israeli military.

Anyone who doubts the importance of the state of Israel to the survivors of the Holocaust should spend a minute with Ruth Brant.

During this time of remembrance, I think it’s important to think about the lessons of the Holocaust. One of them is the obligation of the world to stop genocide wherever it occurs. The world has shown that it has not learned from history. In 1994, an estimated 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda during a period of 100 days. Today, the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan continues as the UN and world governments debate over how to get involved. I wonder: if Sudan were a major oil producer, would the conflict have gone on this long?