Posted on 02/28/2005 12:32:20 AM PST by BykrBayb
Week of Holocaust events helps people remember the past
Event Calendar
By Anne Farrell February 28, 2005
Of more information regarding the Holocaust or CANDLES visit:
www.candles-museum.com
www.ushmm.org
www.holocaustsurvivors.org
www.annefrank.com
From 1933 to 1945, more than two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population was sacrificed along with gypsies, homosexuals, physically disabled and anyone else who was considered to be socially unacceptable.
CSU students are presenting the ninth annual Holocaust Awareness Week beginning today through Friday. This year's theme is "60 years of Liberation: Every Face has a Number. Every Number has a Face" and will celebrate Holocaust survivors' accomplishments and struggles.
"This year's theme is focusing on the survivors. I think that that's so important as we get further away from the Holocaust and when it happened that there are going to be fewer people around to tell the firsthand stories and that's why we wanted to have this year's event," said Hedy Berman, director of Hillel, the Jewish student organization at CSU.
Flags representing those who lost their lives throughout the Holocaust were displayed Friday on the Natural Resources Building lawn. Each flag represents 5,000 lives and will be on display throughout the week.
"To look at the flags themselves is amazing, and to think of that (amount) times 5,000, and to think of the amount of people affected directly and indirectly, and that we are still to this day affected," said Jenn Christ, co-chair of Holocaust Awareness Week. "That's what it is all about, to keep their stories alive."
The week's events will begin with a panel of three Holocaust survivors who will share their stories at 7 p.m. today in the Lory Student Center Main Ballroom. The event will be followed by a question-and-answer period.
The keynote speaker for this year's event will be Eva Kor, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp as well as founder of both the Holocaust Museum in Indiana and Children of the Auschwitz Nazi Lab Experiment Survivors (CANDLES), an organization designed to locate and reunite survivors of the twin medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz.
Kor will be speaking at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the student center north ballroom in a speech titled "Echoes from Auschwitz." She will relate her own and her sister's experiences as they were subjected to Dr. Josef Mengele's twin experiments. She will also present "My Long Journey to Healing" as part of the Women at Noon Series on Wednesday in student center room 230.
Mengele, often referred to as the Angel of Death, selected twins from platforms at Auschwitz, placed them within special barracks and then used them as experimental specimens. One twin would be used as a control while the other was to be subjected to experiments. One thousand five hundred sets of twins (3,000 children) were selected for the experiments; at liberation, around 200 were released. Today there are about 150 CANDLES members alive, according to the organization's Web site.
Events this week are designed to inform students about Holocaust awareness. Many will take place in the student center, including "The Litany of the Martyrs," where the names of people who were murdered in the Holocaust are read. These readings take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today through Thursday and from 10 a.m. to noon on Friday.
"The Litany of Martyrs always has such a big impact being in the student center, with such high traffic at the time," said Katie Frey a junior psychology major and member of the awareness committee.
"It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more" - July 15, 1944 "The Diary of Anne Frank"
and how come we don't have memorials and remembrances of all the hundreds of millions slaughtered by communists??? I think they need some recognition too.
OK, back to the show.
I hope they tell the students how the Holocaust began. There are a lot of supposedly educated people who don't know.
The National Social German Workers Party disarming the people, or did the previous guys do that?... anyway they weren't much different from commies.
You mean it didn't start with the mass extermination of Jews? There was actually a series of events that led up to that? If we stop those events from happening here, will we reduce the chances of a holocaust happening here?
Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, German resisters, Poles, Slavs, Russians, French, and a host of others including those turned in, under such a system, by others who wanted their property, or wanted them gone for some personal grudge, and were better connected.
I'll just bet the lot of it is mysteriously NOT REMEMBERED by the modern Holocaust deniers, who want people to assume that 4-6 million Jews were brutally and savagely murdered or left to die (which I don't question at all), all the while 5-6 million others just - disappeared - somehow, and we won't talk about it in polite company.
Never forget, they say. Well, the very sort to say that - have already forgotten. This is a past no one dare forget.
Remember, too, the horror at the discovery of just who was looking the other way or was actively, eagerly participating in all this. Not idiots. Fools maybe. But not incompetents. These were trained professionals, intelligent people, those otherwise respected in their societies, before the war, publishing papers, books, which were read worldwide and studied. In that sense, at least, they were not stupid. That's the frightening lesson that Alexander wanted people to remember in his postwar-studies of The Third Reich.
have you ever heard of the Arab Nazi's?? After the war they were funded by the UK and then by the US, they became Al-Queada and the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups.
I read somewhere that Soviet POWs, because they were both 'Slavic' and Communist, were left in their own camp in Auschwitz with no food whatsoever. They ate all the grass bare, and then turned to each other.
If WWI was a senseless war, WWII was the exact opposite - fought with and for the purpose of self-righteous brutality, at least on the part of Germany and Japan.
I recently ran across an interesting expression, "desk murderers." Desk murderers were those who may not have personally killed anyone but they gave the orders, signed the papers, etc. all from the comfort of their offices. Every totalitarian system needs its desk murderers in order to function. Groupthink makes this possible. Groupthink enabled the killers to suspend all judgement and just focus on being efficient little monsters. Of course our schools and popular culture never teach about the dangers of groupthink.
They were mirror images of each other.
One difference. Jews were hunted down and specifically targeted for extermination. They were wiped away in many countries occupied by the Nazis.
No need to mix everyone together. What day do we remember the Massacre of Jews at the Katyn Forest?? by the Russians??
Naziism and Communism were nearly identical and they used the same type of anti-capitalist rhetoric
What is ironic is that Hitler was the only one Stalin trusted.
Communists call Nazi's 'right-wing' but then again to them Trotsky was probably 'right-wing'
If it bothers you so much, why don't you make one?
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