[img]96|left|||no_popup[/img] Dateline Jerusalem — The sirens screamed for 2 full minutes as all of Israel came to a standstill.

Dogs howled while all pedestrian and vehicle traffic came to an abrupt halt and ceased to move. People exited their cars in the middle of streets and highways. They stood at attention with heads slightly bowed, goosebumps on their arms, tears in their eyes in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Memorial Day was observed in Israel this week. As I stood still, I could only think of the meeting I attended the day before where a young Israeli girl spoke of her high school trip to 3 concentration camps in Poland and the stories told by concentration camp survivors with tattoos of numbers burned into their arms sitting with me in the audience.

I was one of the youngest people at the meeting, and I am a grandmother. One woman in the audience was a teenager when she was at the infamous Auschwitz Concentration Camp. She said “I was in block No. 30.” She told us that the horror stories we hear today about the Holocaust are nothing compared to what actually occurred there. Things were far worse. Words alone cannot describe the inhumanity that was Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

The Ugly History

The main speaker, the young Israeli girl, told us that photographs and the empty buildings of the concentration camps today cannot possibly portray the horrors within the red gate of Auschwitz. Three train tracks brought Jews from all over Europe, non-stop, to the concentration camp. There were 4 gas chambers. She said that she could see the scratchings on the wall where people tried to unsuccessfully claw their way out of the gas chambers. The saddest part of all was the special “children's area” of the camp. Although children were usually among the first put to death, some were kept in this area while they waited to be used as guinea pigs for Dr. Josef Mengele.

Most of Auschwitz today is a museum where visitors can roam throughout the camp, except for Block No. 10 where Dr. Mengele performed his “medical experiments,” which were nothing short of torture.

The Israeli girl also spoke of going to Treblinka Extermination Camp. Entering through a forest, what remains of Treblinka are stones. Nothing else. The sizes of the stones represent the sizes of the various Jewish communities wiped out during the Holocaust. Treblinka is also a museum, but one of nothing but stones. More than 90 percent of the people at Treblinka were immediately sent to their deaths.

Majdanek Concentration Camp, however, is not a museum. It is in the same state it was at the end of World War II. The Nazis did not have time to try and destroy it like they did to Treblinka.

This death camp had rows of barracks. Unlike some of the other camps, it was in a populated area of Poland. She told us that she cannot forget the mounds of shoes piled up in the courtyard, especially the children's shoes. The crematorium, where bodies were burned after being murdered in the gas chambers, had a hill of ash next to it. The ash was the cremated bodies of the Jewish victims. Since a cremated human being's ash fits into an area not much bigger than a large match box, it is mind boggling to imagine the number of people who must have been cremated to create the hill of ash. For me, it is hard to imagine how people could live in homes next to a concentration camp and breath in the smoke of burning bodies and not do anything.

Aussies Were Welcoming

Another woman told us that many of the Jewish refugee survivors of the Holocaust made their way to Australia after the concentration camps were liberated. She said that not only was Australia one of the few countries in the world that took in as many Jews as possible when other countries kept them out due to immigration quotas, but that the Jews were happy to go to Australia because they wanted to get as far away from Europe as possible. Someone described the Jewish refugees as having eyes that were “dead.”

When someone asked how the world could have let the Holocaust happen, a man in the audience said “It is easier to split an atom than to give up hatred.”

That probably is true since over 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. The state of Israel has a memorial ceremony where 6 torches are lit on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day) at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, one light for each million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. At the end of the meeting, a woman with tears in her eyes and her voice breaking up, recited “The Valley of the Dry Bones” from the Book of Ezekiel. We all stood in silence as a man at the meeting sang a memorial prayer for the dead.

Now, 66 years after the end of World War II, only y 208,000 Holocaust survivors remain alive today in Israel. Most are over 80 years old.

Will the world remember the horror once these souls pass on?

With Holocaust studies being outlawed in some Western countries and in most Arab countries because it is considered offensive to Muslims, who teach their children it never happened, will the memory of the Holocaust die when the survivors die?

We must never forget.

L'hitraot.  Shachar