This past January 27, the world honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also the anniversary of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp liberation. For 2020, this year was also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and although this Monday usually seems like every other Monday, this day represents one of the greatest atrocities of mankind’s history. Union residents should know that the Holocaust occurred (there are deniers out there in the world) and should actively teach future generations about the tragedy.
The origins of the Holocaust did not begin with the slaughtering of innocent Jews but rather with extremely careful political maneuvers. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 (which would be a whole history lesson that we cannot get into here), he began to build concentration camps in Germany for political opponents or “undesirables.” The first of these camps was Dachau, which was outside of Munich. After obtaining dictatorial control of the government, Hitler passed laws discriminating against Jews, and after starting World War II in 1939, Hitler and the Nazi Regime setup ghettos to segregate Jews from the rest of society. During the years that followed, the Nazi Regime packed Jews into cattle cars to concentration camps. Many died during this journey, but many more would die in from the torture that awaited them.
Most of these concentration camps were designed as “labor” camps in which the prisoners would work until they either died or the camp was liberated near the end of the war. Despite the focus primarily of Jews, they were not the only ones trapped in this nightmare. The Nazis imprisoned many other groups as well—Slavs, Soviets, Romas (gypsies), political prisoners, religious fanatics, and homosexuals. The official goal of these camps was to produce weapons for the war machine; however, the true reason was much more sinister, Hitler and the Nazis desired the extermination of all these people. Some of these concentration camps were designated as death camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the most famous of these camps. In these camps, the SS officers separated the old and sick from the other prisoners upon arrival. The old and weak then entered “showers” where they choked to death on poisonous gas. The other prisoners then burned the bodies of the dead. Their ashes still remain there to this day.
During the Holocaust, Hitler and his followers were allowed to murder six million people, a number greater than the populations of Mississippi and Alabama combined. Eventually, Allied Forces finally liberated these camps in the last few months of the war; however, survivors lived with immense loss and grief for many years. Many of them lost loved ones, and most could never return to their old lives. The memory of the Holocaust deserves more than a single day of remembrance, which is why everyone must educate themselves and others on the horrors that occurred. Whether seeing a concentration camp in person (the best way), experiencing the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., or learning from someone else, remembering the Holocaust is the only way to ensure a similar atrocity never happens again.
