In the year 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.  Aside from conquering Europe as a way of providing “lebensraum“, or “living room” for the Aryan Race, the goal of the Nazi Party was what they described as the “Final Solution”.  That was the total elimination of the Jews.  The Jews, of whom there were many thousands in Germany and all over the rest of Europe, have been scapegoats for centuries.  They have been murdered, expelled, censored, and discriminated against, nearly everywhere they reside.  During World War II, the Nazis murdered over six million Jews.  And we Jews today, along with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, vow Never to Forget what happened.

Holocaust Remembrance Day occurs on January 27 each year, marking the liberation of the Nazis worst death-camp, Auschwitz in Poland, in January of 1945.  According to Yad Vashem, the Nazis had over 40,000 concentration camps, slave-labor camps, and ghettos all over Europe.  The worst kinds of brutality took place at all those camps, and it was miraculous that there were actually survivors.

Today, Yad Vashem is running their iRemember program.  If you go to iremember.yadvashem.org, you can choose a victim to remember, or be randomly matched with a Holocaust victim, to ensure that every victim of the Nazi horror is remembered.  My Jewish family was lucky, and none of my relatives, that I know of, perished in the Holocaust.  So I asked to be randomly assigned a victim.  Today, I Remember Yitzkhak Rozner.

This young man did not deserve to die in the prime of his life.  None of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust did.  So we must remember them today, and forever.  We need to teach our children about the Holocaust, so this kind of horror will not recur in the future.  Yad Vashem has an excellent Web site, with all sorts of learning materials, if you need help.  I urge all my readers and followers to visit Yadvashem.org, and learn more about the Holocaust, so you may tell your children and relatives what happened.

My husband and I visited Yad Vashem in 2007 on our trip to Israel with Michael Medved.  Here are some pictures.

So, today, I ask my readers and followers to Remember the Holocaust.  Never Forget the victims.