International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is appropriate for each of us to remember the millions of innocent men, women and children slaughtered in pursuit of a crackpot racial idea.

The Nazi’s murderous scheme did not originate full blown from Adolf Hitler’s fevered imagination. The history of anti-Semitism is long and tortuous, nor was it exorcized with the utter destruction of the Nazis more than seventy years ago. As Primo Levi once observed:

It happened,
Therefore it can happen again. . .
It can happen everywhere.

So, as we remember the dead, let us all dedicate ourselves to insuring that it never does happen again, confronting injustice and intolerance wherever we see it.

The final paragraph of Odd Nansen’s Postscript to his diary reads: “The worst crime you can commit today, against yourself and society, is to forget what happened and sink back into indifference. What happened was worse than you have any idea of–and it was the indifference of mankind that let it take place!”

As true today as when wrote the Postscript in 1946.

The foregoing first appeared in a slightly different form in January 2016

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  • April 11, 2024: Our World, Kiawah, SC
  • May 5, 2024: Hadassah, Stonebridge, Monroe Twp, NJ
  • June 2, 2024: Yiddish Club, Monroe, NJ
  • June 3, 2024: Wilton, CT Public Library
  • September 28, 2024: Swedish American Museum of Chicago (Virtual)

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On This Date

< 2023 >
February
  • 01

    All day
    Feb 01, 2023-Jan 24, 2024
    Vidkun Quisling installed as Minister-President of Norway
  • 02

    All day
    Feb 02, 2023-Jan 25, 2024
    German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad
  • 16

    All day
    Feb 16, 2023-Feb 07, 2024
    Altmark Affair in Jøssingfjord, Norway
  • 16

    All day
    Feb 16, 2023-Feb 08, 2024
    Odd Nansen meets Tommy Buergenthal
  • 19

    All day
    Feb 19, 2023-Feb 11, 2024
    Count Folke Bernadotte’s meets with Himmler to negotiate the release of Scandinavian prisoners
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