By Daniel S. Mariaschin, JNS
Memory is not the work of a day. We must not lose a minute in telling—and retelling—what happened when the world turned dark.
The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz will be marked next week as survivors, Jewish community leaders, diplomats and political figures from around the world gather in Poland to remember the vile crimes committed there, and throughout Europe, from 1940 to 1945.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day—held annually on Jan. 27, the day the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated—will also be observed at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, where it has been a much-belated fixture on the U.N. calendar since 2005.
For people who are too young to recall the rise of the Nazis and their 12-year regime of terror or for those who were born after the Holocaust, how does one “remember?” How can one sufficiently commemorate such unfathomable crimes at a time when the number of eyewitnesses who experienced this horror drops every day? How do you adequately convey the enormity of the crimes and the lessons we are supposed to learn from those nightmarish years of persecution and destruction of Jewish communities across much of the European landmass?
I thought about this when, in the lobby of my synagogue recently, I stopped to read the certificate that describes a Czech Torah that sits prominently in that space. The Torah, “Number 945,” was part of a group of 1,564 scrolls that were gathered and saved after World War II by the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust and distributed to synagogues worldwide. This particular scroll was believed to be from Bohemia and written in the early 19th century.
As I read the certificate, I thought of the dozens upon dozens of Czech and Slovak communities that housed and used these Torahs over so many decades. More than 260,000 Jews in the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic were killed during the Holocaust—the decimation of vibrant Jewish life that left these Torah scrolls without rabbis, congregants and students to serve.
I also think, especially at this time of year, of what became of my mother’s family in Lithuania in August and September of 1941, when round-ups in the shtetl and surrounding villages where her family lived resulted in mass shootings of more than 11,000 Jews in the Pivonia forest outside the town of Ukmerge. Among those killed were my mother’s aunt and uncle. My mother had been brought to America as a child decades before, but her many references to the family lost in the Holocaust played a central role in creating a personal “memory” for me.
My many visits to Lithuania over the years, primarily focused on Holocaust-restitution issues, have invariably found me walking the streets of Vilna and trying to imagine how that city, which was more than 30% Jewish in 1941, must have looked and sounded with its streets crowded with large synagogues and shtiebels (small prayer rooms), shops selling all manner of goods, cobblers, tailors, butchers and bakers, and the sound of Yiddish spoken by all. Gone now, save for some sites that have been or are being preserved. But those walks along Vilna’s many medieval alleys and narrow streets have become an important part of my “memory” as well.
Knowing survivors and refugees has also allowed me to fill in the blanks on Holocaust remembrance.
As a young program organizer for the annual community Holocaust commemoration in Boston, I met survivors, including one who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Our program attracted a mix of survivors and their families, as well as some Jewish leaders, and was held on the campus of Brandeis University. Kaddish was always recited near Nathan Rapoport’s sculpture of Job. I remember being overcome with a sweeping feeling of sorrow in hearing and watching those who had experienced the depths of depravity less than 30 years before. I cherish my many meetings with that group of survivors, who conveyed their “memory” to me.
Each year, B’nai B’rith organizes an annual Holocaust remembrance program at, or in conjunction with, the United Nations. A number of these programs have focused on countries in which Jews were saved or to which they fled and found safe haven, including Albania, Bulgaria and the Philippines.
This year, we will honor Joseph and Rebecca Bau, largely unrecognized heroes. Born in Krakow, Poland, Joseph Bau was a graphic artist who survived the Plaszow concentration camp because of his special talent for lettering, and making maps and signs. His story did not end there. Surreptitiously, he forged identity papers for those who were able to escape the camp. His secret marriage in the camp to Rebecca was incorporated into Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Though they were played by actors in the film, you can see the real Baus placing a stone on Oskar Schindler’s grave in the movie’s closing scenes.
Bau became one of Israel’s leading graphic artists, creating movie and product art known to most Israelis. He was an inventor and a pioneer animator. What is not widely known is the vital role he played in forging papers for those who engaged in some of Israel’s most important intelligence exploits abroad. Their daughters now run a small museum in Tel Aviv in what was once Bau’s studio, dedicated to his work and his memory.
A new motion picture, “Bau, Artist at War,” will have its American premiere this year. B’nai B’rith will screen the movie in March at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Holocaust remembrance embraces the need to educate, which in the 21st-century encompasses much more than classroom instruction—though that is clearly important. With the accelerating loss of survivors, the use of AI, holograms and other means of perpetuating memory and personal experience are now being utilized in museums, universities, public schools and other fora for new generations now 80 years or more removed from the worst crimes ever perpetrated on the Jewish people.
The Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023—carried out by a terrorist organization whose genocidal aims were on full view for the world to see—were a stark reminder of the depths of evil that were visited upon the Jews of Europe every single day from 1939 to 1945. What happened that day gave us a glimpse into the same barbarity unleashed some 85 years before.
Each of us sees memory through a different prism. The common denominator imperative for us is not to let the passage of decades shift the narrative of the Holocaust. The rush to stain Israel with the blood libel of genocide, and with it an accompanying global explosion of anti-Semitism over these past 16 months, is a most glaring example of revisionism unfolding before our eyes, of transforming Jews from victims to victimizers to cloud memory and erase our history. That is the big challenge we face today, and it comes on top of our ongoing obligation to educate about the Shoah itself, especially in the face of growing Holocaust denial on the internet and elsewhere.
When a Claims Conference survey a few years ago showed a shocking number of young people who think that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves, it spoke volumes about how much work needs to be done to preserve memory and historical truth. And so, having an international day designated to remember the Holocaust is vital. That’s why we organize events on that day and encourage governments and others to join in these commemorations on a global scale.
But memory is not the work of a day. In the Internet age, where blood libels and misinformation rule social media and the airwaves, and at a time when fewer and fewer survivors are here to give their personal testimonies, we must not lose a minute in telling—and retelling—what happened when the world turned dark, when collaborators joined the perpetrators and when so many others looked away and did nothing.
Nearly five generations later, it is an obligation that falls on each of us.
