{"id":524,"date":"2015-01-27T22:23:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T22:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2015\/01\/27\/myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust\/"},"modified":"2015-02-20T03:34:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T03:34:25","slug":"myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2015\/01\/27\/myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-524 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2015\/01\/27\/myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust\/attachment\/525\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/files\/2015\/01\/tumblr_niulwm3Env1snfp5eo1_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2015\/01\/27\/myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust\/attachment\/526\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/files\/2015\/01\/tumblr_niulwm3Env1snfp5eo2_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/myalchod.tumblr.com\/post\/109315331596\/so-today-is-international-holocaust-remembrance\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">myalchod<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>So today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have to confess I didn\u2019t realise was a thing \u2014 I only knew about Yom ha\u2019Shoa, which is mid-April. But I\u2019m glad it IS a thing, because people need to remember.<\/p>\n<p>The Shoa is intensely personal for me. On my father\u2019s side, I know of thirteen immediate family members who died \u2014 great-aunts, great-uncles, their spouses and children, my great-grandmother. The family was lucky: my grandfather and three of his brothers were early deportees, and managed to escape into Russia when they were driven into the river with machine-gun fire, and a fourth brother spent the war hidden by his German wife. If they hadn\u2019t emigrated from Warsaw to Brno at the end of the 19th century, I probably wouldn\u2019t be here today. My mother\u2019s side fared less well: both of her parents, Hungarian-born, were the only survivours of their immediate families.<\/p>\n<p>I grew up around survivours, reading between the lines, finding stories wherever I could. My grandmother was reticent; she wrote poetry about her experiences but didn\u2019t talk about them. I was eighteen before I knew she\u2019d had a younger brother. It\u2019s one thing to read about Mengele and his white gloves standing on the platform at Auschwitz, and another to finally read about my grandmother\u2019s arrival there and realise she\u2019d seen him. My grandfather never talked until very recently, so I only knew he\u2019d had some time with partisans in Yugoslavia; I didn\u2019t know he\u2019d been in a copper mine down there, nor that he\u2019d narrowly escaped death by virtue of a partisan raid when his column was in transit, nor that he\u2019d walked back home from there. I never met my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, so I never got to hear his story \u2014 and I only ever met my paternal grandmother (who was not Jewish but had her own tales of wartime altercations with the Nazis, as one did if one was Czech) a few times when I was very young. It makes me think of all the voices silenced, of those who never spoke or could not speak, or who tried and were not heard.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not just about anti-Semitism. At its core, the Holocaust \u2014 like any genocide \u2014 has hate of The Other. This day is about remembering what\u2019s happened, and about preventing repetition. A survivour I knew while growing up was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement when she came to the US, and then campaigned for awareness of the genocide in Darfur. If you have the strength to do that, it\u2019s terrific and amazing, but the small things matter too. Stand up for others. Don\u2019t accept what you see going on around you. And more \u2014 be proactive.<\/p>\n<p>Situations like the Shoa \u2014 the death of six million Jews, a million Roma, and countless others, homosexuals and mentally ill and Poles and Slavs and more, whose only crime was being different \u2014 happen because people don\u2019t act. They happen because people don\u2019t stop and think and say, \u201cThis is wrong.\u201d They happen because it\u2019s too easy to say, \u201cHe isn\u2019t like me \u2014 what happens to him doesn\u2019t matter to me. Why should I care?\u201d Care because you\u2019re human. Care because caring is one of the most beautiful things about being human.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.&#8221; (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9) Words to live by, no matter what your beliefs.<\/p>\n<p>[Photos are mine: the Roma\/Sinti Memorial in Berlin, and the memorial by the river at Terezin.]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>myalchod: So today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have to confess I didn\u2019t realise was a thing \u2014 I only knew about Yom ha\u2019Shoa, which is mid-April. But I\u2019m glad it IS a thing, because people need to remember. The Shoa is intensely personal for me. On my father\u2019s side, I know of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2015\/01\/27\/myalchod-so-today-is-international-holocaust\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\"><\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":527,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}