Auschwitz
Holocaust Remembrance Day 🕯
January 27, 2022Today marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945.
Wreaths were placed in Berlin today at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
President Biden said: “Today, we attempt to fill a piercing silence from our past — to give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically and ruthlessly murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.” [AXIOS]
World remembers Holocaust as antisemitism rises in pandemic
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Survivors recalled their agony to a world they fear is forgetting, Israel’s parliamentary speaker wept in the German parliament and politicians warned of a resurgence of antisemitism on Thursday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day falls on the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps where Nazi Germany carried out its Final Solution seeking to murder the Jewish people of Europe.
At the memorial site in Poland, which was subjected to a brutal German occupation during World War II, a small number of survivors gathered in an auditorium. Attendance at the yearly event was sharply curtailed amid Europe’s coronavirus surge. Others joined online.
Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others.
[6,000,000 were murdered in concentration camps during WWII; 1,000,000 were children.]
Mickey Levy, Speaker of the Knesset, reacts during the commemoration of the “Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism” in the German Bundestag, Berlin, Thursday, Jan.27, 2022. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa via AP)
Halina Birenbaum, a 92-year-old Polish-born poet who lives in Israel, recalled her suffering remotely. She was 10 when the Germans invaded and occupied Poland in September 1939, and was 13 when she was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau after being led out of the gas chamber of the Majdanek camp thanks to a malfunction.
“I saw masses of the powerful but arrogant army of Nazi Germany as they marched cruelly, victoriously, into the devastated and burning streets of Warsaw,” she recalled.
“The countless experiences of infinite suffering on the brink of death are already a distant, unimaginable story for new generations,” she said.
Commemorations everywhere took place amid a rise of antisemitism that gained traction during lockdowns as the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated hatred online.
German parliament speaker Baerbel Bas said the pandemic has acted “like an accelerant” to already burgeoning antisemitism.
French President Emmanuel Macron, center, flanked by Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Esther Senot, second left, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor Victor Perahia, right, stand at attention at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022 in Paris. . Holocaust survivors and politicians warned about the resurgence of antisemitism and Holocaust denial as the world remembered Nazi atrocities and commemorated the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Thursday. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, Pool)
Miejsce Pamięci i Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau
Official recording from the LIVE stream of the commemoration event for the 77th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz (January 27, 2022, 16 CET).
‘Holocaust Remembrance Day was designated by United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005. The resolution came after a special session was held earlier that year on 24 January to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust.’ [wikipedia]
From Marianne Williamson:
Dear God,
On this day of painful remembrance,
Please bless the souls of those who died in the Holocaust.
Bless the souls of those who were targeted,
and bless the souls of those who helped them.
Heal the hearts of those who carry the scars of evil,
and awaken our hearts and strengthen us
for the work that we must do today.
Help us
to create a world in which evil such as that
will occur no more.
Amen
In the words of Elie Weisel, a survivor of Holocaust who dedicated his life to our deeper understanding of its significance,
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories.”
Today, we must do a lot with them. Today may we all bear witness.
Auschwitz Memorial Podcast
“The official podcast of the Auschwitz Memorial. The history of Auschwitz is exceptionally complex. It combined two functions: a concentration camp and an extermination center. Nazi Germany persecuted various groups of people there, and the camp complex continually expanded and transformed itself. In the podcast “On Auschwitz,” we discuss the details of the history of the camp as well as our contemporary memory of this important and special place.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-auschwitz/id1568273147
Online lessons: http://lesson.auschwitz.org
From the Auschwitz Memorial, Saturday, January 29th, 2022
29 January 1936 | A French Jewish boy, Michel Ejzenberg, was born in Paris. He arrived at #Auschwitz on 26 August 1942 in a transport of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy. He was murdered in a gas chamber after selection.
Please follow them on social media. Everyday, they post a photo on the birthday of a prisoner from the concentration camps during WWII. On Twitter: @AuschwitzMuseum
We honor their memory, and remember their promise.
-dayle
Santosa
March 30, 2021Contentment is not complacency, it is reverence. -Tao Te Ching
J. Krishnamutri:
“Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change which comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.”
The song that is sung by a world that is sacred. -Rolph Gates
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Etty Hillesum [1914–1943], a young Jewish woman who was killed at Auschwitz:
“…every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable.”
‘All gave some, some gave all.’
May 27, 2019
John Adams: ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’
~
In a time when everything was being swept away, when “the whole world is becoming a giant concentration camp,” [Etty Hillesum] felt one must hold fast to what endures—the encounter with God at the depths of one’s own soul and in other people.
-Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time
To follow their own paths to wholeness, both Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961) and Jewish Auschwitz victim Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) trusted in and hearkened to the voice of God in their deepest Selves.
When accusers called Joan of Arc (1412–1431) the victim of her own imagination, she is frequently credited with this brilliant reply: “How else would God speak to me?”
Intuitive truth, that inner whole-making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this “God,” even when that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness.
Late in his life, Jung wrote, “In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” Jung, a supposed unbeliever, knew that any authentic God experience takes a lot of humble, honest, and patient seeking.
-Fr. Richard Rohr
[From a letter to a pupil (April 9, 1959). See C. G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950,selected and edited by Gerhard Adler.]