From Yom Ha-Shoah to the Sudan; The Pen-Pals Visit

Today is Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In Israel, air raid sirens blared for two straight minutes, as the entire country came to a standstill. At Auschwitz, visitors made a two mile trek to Birkaneu, where Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a speech telling the world never to forget. First Lady Laura Bush gave a speech on the South Lawn of the White House - telling us to bare witness and to remember, so that such an atrocity can never happen again.

And yet right now in the Darfur region of Sudan a brutal genocide is taking place, and the Bushes aren’t doing anything about it. We haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust if we can’t stand up and save these people. It seems that the American government is only interested in saving the victims of genocide if they are white.

I was listening to a wonderful program on NPR today, where a survivor of the Gunskirche camp in Austria was reunited with his American liberator. They shared their experiences of that day, 60 years ago tomorrow, when the Americans rolled into Gunskirche and saw the emaciated dehumanized prisoners with their own eyes.

Martin Weiss, the survivor, says that he thinks young people respond to the story of the Holocaust, but Edgar Edelsack, his liberator disagrees. “They’ll listen,” he says of my generation, “but they don’t really hear.”

Growing up, I didn’t feel terribly connected to the Holocaust. It seemed so long ago. But as I grow older and begin my life as an adult with the man I love, I can begin to imagine what it would feel like to have it all ripped away from me. And only then do I begin to understand.

Click Here to find out more about what you can do to help in the Sudan. And Click Here to hear the NPR story of which I spoke.