By PAUL KELLER
It is still impossible to understand decades later how a supposedly civilized German people permitted this horrific period in human history to take place, doing nothing to stop it. We mourn the loss of six million innocent souls, among them a substantial number of my immediate family, whose only "crime" was that they believed in and practiced Judaism. We remember the ovens, the piled-up bodies at the concentration camps, and we will never forget the images of emaciated, dying souls with their skeletal bodies and their deep-set, haunting eyes.
When the carnage was all over, we said:"Never again" to genocide, but we haven't succeeded. We remember Rwanda, the Balkans, Darfur. We have learned nothing.
On this memorial day we also mourn the fifty million other human beings whose life ended violently as a result of Hitler's fantasy of world domination. The numbers are staggering, and every part of the world was caught up in this vortex of death. We lost almost a half million of our own ever so valiant military forces which provided the deciding fatal blow to the Hitler madness. It is said that Russia lost twenty-five million people, Germany more than seven. And casualties among the Japanese, Chinese and other Asians and Europeans ran high. I saw bodies after bodies during military actions in the Pacific theater, and I remember them.
I remember the destruction of hundreds of holy places by German hordes during the "night of broken glass" (Kristall Nacht) on November 9-10 1938. The synagogue in my home town, a beautiful free-standing edifice of modern design, was burned down by gleeful brown-shirts, SS men and civilians. The next day, the Nazis dynamited what was left standing and then proceeded to make the congregation pay for the clean-up of the rubble.
I remember on this day of remembrance the millions of refugees like myself who, though lucky to escape ignoble death, endured momentous hardships in their struggle to begin a new life in strange surroundings, in new cultures. My father, who was 65 years old at the time, arrived in the United States in 1940 with $10 in his pocket . That is all the Nazis would let him take out of the country. He spoke no English but he needed a job and he got one. He stuffed envelopes for a direct mail marketer. What a comedown for a man who owned a successful business employing fifteen German citizens and who, though not rich, was always able to provide an ample lifestyle for his wife and two children.
What a traumatic psychological challenge it must have been for this man to be reduced to an envelope stuffer at minimum wage, not earning enough to sustain his family. I think of my father and the many other fathers and mothers who fought to keep their heads above water in strange lands, all victims of the holocaust .
On this day we also remember the many valiant gentiles who put their lives on line by harboring and sheltering the persecuted. We think of Schindler and Wallenberg and the Danish people who defied the Nazis and rescued thousands. We think of Miep Gies, Anne Frank's protector. We stand in awe of their heroism. Without them, the toll would have been higher. But we also think of what might have been, had the United States been less rigid in its immigration policy and taken in more refugees.
We think of the ocean liner St. Louis which, in 1939 with 900 or so refugees aboard, came to within a few miles of the U.S. coastline only to be denied entry by our government because its passengers had no visas.
The ship had to return to Europe and the majority of the passengers fell into Nazi hands to be sent to their death. Today, illegal immigration far exceeds 900.
We must never forget the holocaust and its human devastation, its racism, its abject disregard for human life even when those of us who were caught up in it are no longer here as reminders. We must teach our children so they can teach their children that genocide is the most savage form of human behavior. We owe it to those who perished in it.
