International Holocaust Remembrance Day

 

Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.  More than 6 million Jews -- two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population -- and millions of others were exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

Elie Wiesel, the Museum’s founding chairman, was deported to Auschwitz with his family in May 1944. He was selected for forced labor and survived. He later said, “I thought in 1945 antisemitism died in Auschwitz, but I was wrong. Its victims perished, antisemitism did not.”

We are witness to the revolting truth of Wiesel's observation today around the world and here in the U.S., with the tiki torch marches, the casual displays of Nazi salutes, the killing of Jewish Americans in their synagogues.  That's why it's more important than ever to remember what happens when evil is allowed to fester, and to not be indifferent to its manifestations.  As Wiesel said many times in many forms, 

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.

Never again.