On Monday, January 29 the United Nations will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a ceremony in the General Assembly Hall at UN Headquarters in New York. The UN Department of Public Information (DPI) will launch an online web resource, developed by Yad Vashem and the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California (SFI). The website will serve UN information centers staff across the globe.
Accessible from Yad Vashem’s homepage, the new website features four SFI testimonies, augmented with primary source materials, including original artifacts and photographs, authentic diary and letter extracts, encyclopedia and lexicon entries, educational resources and briefing notes from Yad Vashem’s vast archives and comprehensive databases.
Also launched by Yad Vashem is a mini-site in Farsi now online. The mini-site includes 20 historical chapters - including dozens of photos - arranged chronologically, from the rise of the Nazis to power until the post-war trials.
Yad Vashem’s traveling “No Child’s Play” exhibit will open at the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) Vienna International Center (VIC) Rotunda on January 26. A special version of the exhibit in German has been produced for this event, and will be on display at the UN center in Vienna from January 26 - February 2. The exhibition tells the story of the struggle of children to hold on to life during the Holocaust.
A special new online exhibit, "Flickers of Light", highlights the stories of six Righteous Among the Nations who helped Jews in Auschwitz.
Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research will hold an international conference "The Holocaust, Medicine and Medical Ethics" on January 24-25, 2007. The conference, held in cooperation with the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion - The Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, will take place at Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies’ Branch in Givatayim, Beit Wolyn.
Scholars from Israel - representing all the universities - the United States and Germany will address Nazi medicine, Jewish physicians during the Holocaust, current educational programs on medical ethics, new research on the Holocaust and medicine and ideas for the future of medical education and ethics.
From the Yad Vashem website:
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last such camp still functioning. They found 7,000 survivors from among the more than 1,000,000 people murdered there. Several days earlier, the camp’s Nazi staff had marched out more than 50,000 inmates in order to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. Most of these were also murdered. More than 90% of all these victims, both the murdered and the survivors, were Jews. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination center created by the Nazis. It has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of willful radical evil in our time.
When in October 2005 the UN adopted January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, it recognized the enduring impact of the Holocaust on our world. The wounds are still open, the memories are still raw, and the effects of the Holocaust have not dimmed. Its shadow looms ever large as the world continues to struggle to navigate out of the terrible human potential that the Holocaust bared, towards a future where humanity has learned how to prevent such things from recurring. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan has said, the UN was built largely on the ashes of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust shook the very foundations of modern civilization, calling into question our understanding of humanity itself. Modern nations were found wanting at best, murdering at worst. For the first time in modern history, one nation set out to murder an entire nation, without leaving behind a single exception. There was to be no conversion, no assimilation, no pity on the elderly, and no mercy for the children. The Jews represented for the Nazis and their collaborators all that they held to be wrong in this world, such as the concept of human equality, based on the belief that all human beings are created in God’s image.
Murdering all the Jews meant murdering modern civilization, in order to replace with a Nazi racist, antisemitic, totalitarian, and brutal vision of the world. And parallel to the millions of human beings who were to disappear off the face of the earth simply because they had a Jewish background, many other people who were undesirable in the Nazis’ eyes were to be persecuted, enslaved, or murdered.
The awakening of the UN to Holocaust commemoration is an important step in heightening awareness of the Holocaust and of its devastating impact on the world. More than sixty years since the Holocaust, we still wonder what the world has learned. This year we can say perhaps that the world has learned to remember, and in remembrance of the particular event - the murder of the Jews - we can address the universal implications - the challenge posed to modern civilization. Only in remembering and learning the past can we hope to secure the future.