International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27, the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Nazi’s Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. In 2005, the United Nations assigned the date to commemorate the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims. But recently, the Google calendar removed International Holocaust Remembrance Day as part of the trend to blank out cultural and ethnic observances. Given growing antisemitism and violence, like the recent arson of a Mississippi synagogue, many of us are determined to disallow this erasure of the Holocaust.
A good example of determination is the Jan. 27 debut of the Polish HBO Original documentary “33 Photos from the Ghetto.” It focuses on the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and its brutal repression by German forces. The film shares the stories of a family using photographs taken secretly by a young Polish firefighter. The family preserved the images for decades, but hadn’t brought them to light. After 80 years, the son of the photographer discovered the forgotten negatives and launched an investigation. The team of researchers, archivists and animators were able to reconstruct locations, contexts and the lives captured in each frame.
Chattanooga is fortunate to have someone who can share similar firsthand stories of the Holocaust. Bea Lurie is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and has co-authored the book, “Life Must Go On: The Remarkable Story of Sol Lurie, the Kovno Ghetto, and the Tragic Fate of Lithuania’s Jews.” She’s been touring the country sharing the life stories of her dad Sol, now age 95. Why is Bea doing this?
“Without learning the history of Lithuania and my father’s hometown of Kovno,” she told me, “it would be impossible to understand how more than 95% of all Jews in Lithuania were murdered in the Holocaust, the highest number of any other country.”
Although antisemitism existed in Lithuania long before the Nazi invasion, Sol had a wonderful childhood, enjoying ice skating, horseback riding, sledding and skiing. With the Nazi invasion, the family, along with other Jews, attempted to escape. They survived while many did not, but were forced into a Kovno ghetto sealed with barbed wire. Daily, the Nazis rounded up and murdered children, women, the disabled and the infirm. Sol ended up in six extermination camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, and by the end of the Holocaust, only 12 members of his extended family survived. More than 100 members were killed.
Bea has had her own struggles as a child of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. The survivors’ resilience is remarkable, but understand that the trauma of the Holocaust is deeply embedded and passed along to next generations. I’ve experienced this a bit myself, since my dad was a liberator of extermination camps and never recovered from what he saw.
Bea and I have responded by writing and speaking about our family’s eyewitness stories. The goal is to educate upcoming generations about the history and dangers of antisemitism. She’s determined to do so. Me, too. I wrote the foreword to Bea’s book and will speak virtually at St. Elizabeth Catholic University on Jan. 27 on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
While intergenerational communication like ours is vital, it’s fading. Bea quotes 2020 Pew Research survey results: only a third of teens and 43% of adults know that Adolph Hitler was elected through a democratic process as chancellor; only 38% of teens and 45% of adults knew that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Ugh!
Fortunately, history comes alive when eyewitness testimonies are shared. See my documentary as created at Chattanooga’s Jewish Federation/Cultural Center: “Untold, Stories of a World War II Liberator” on YouTube.
Deborah Levine is an author, trainer/coach and editor of the American Diversity Report.