Jim Terry
Never ending holocaust
By Jim Terry
A few days ago I visited Yad Vashem, which in Hebrew means "a monument and a name," The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem. It is a sobering reminder that evil does exist in the world and illustrates the cruelty man is capable of. Displays include Nazi artifacts, footage of Nazi rallies, letters and personal items from victims of Hitler's "Final Solution," and an urn containing ashes of Holocaust victims, gathered at the extermination camps.
As you meander through the museum, you pass the warped and rusted frame of a Nazi truck, once used to transport Jewish bodies from the gas chambers to mass graves. A stone from a synagogue burned the Night of Broken Glass – Kristallnacht – sits beneath the quote from a Hitler stooge: "Today, I would not want to be a Jew in Germany." Encased in a transparent box in the floor, which you must pass, are hundreds of shoes shed by those headed to Hitler's gas chambers.
I came upon a display case which contained two long braids of light brown hair, a little bag with a Star of David embroidered on it and a photo of the Hirsch family. The braids belonged to Lili Hirsch, a twelve year old girl. I was suddenly reminded of my twelve year old granddaughter whose thick, wavy hair – with the exception of one year when she cut off her long tresses and donated them to an organization which makes hairpieces for children affected by cancer – has always been let to grow long.
Lili, with her mother, father and a brother was a resident of Tagu Mares, Transylvania. The Nazis had given an order that all Jewish residents of Tagu Mares must relocate to a ghetto. Lili's mother knew it would be difficult to keep Lili's long hair groomed with the conditions as they would be in the ghetto and convinced Lili to allow her to cut off the braids and give them, with other family belongings, to a neighbor for safekeeping.
After a few weeks in the ghetto, the family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where the father and brother were separated from Lili and her mother. Lili and her mother were sent to the gas chamber. Lili's father and brother, after separation, illness and harsh treatment were finally reunited in September 1945. When they returned to Tagu Mares, the only family possession they found was the little bag containing Lili's long braids. The braids lay on the shelf of this museum neatly displayed, neatly braided as though they had been cut yesterday, not more than seventy years ago.
An ongoing project of Yad Vashem is the search for names of those Jews who vanished in the Holocaust. Currently, of the estimated six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis – one and a half million of them children – four and one-half million names are known and commemorated at the museum's Hall of Names.
The children's memorial at Yad Vashem, located in an underground cavern, commemorates the children murdered in the Holocaust. Upon entering the memorial, you are greeted by photos of children, some smiling, some sober. Then you are plunged into darkness, with the exception of a single candle which, by a system of mirrors, surrounds you with millions of starlike lights. And as you pass through this darkness, about every eight seconds, a voice calls out a name: Paula Kolin, twelve years old, Poland...Ginette Alman, six years old, France...Herbert Gruen, thirteen years old, Austria...Svetlana Mishlimovich, three years old, Russia. If the names of all million and a half children were known, the reading of those names would take nearly 140 days.
Unfortunately, Yad Vashem is a reminder of a holocaust of the past, not a holocaust of the present. Since 1973, when the United States Supreme Court, in a case titled Roe v Wade, declared abortion under nearly all circumstances to be legal, about 60,000,000 Americans have been murdered.
Most who justify this holocaust argue that a woman has the legal right to decide what happens with her own body. Others who agree, however, say that abortion should not be used for birth control. Both camps see their intentions as good. But the result is the same – ten times the number of Hitler's murders.
If the United States had a memorial to those victims of our holocaust similar to the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem, reading the names of the dead through today would take more than fifteen years. The problem is that the list would never be completely read because the holocaust continues at the rate of almost 700,000 murders per year.
The link below will take you to the Abortion Clock: http://www.numberofabortions.com/
© Jim Terry
November 26, 2018
A few days ago I visited Yad Vashem, which in Hebrew means "a monument and a name," The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem. It is a sobering reminder that evil does exist in the world and illustrates the cruelty man is capable of. Displays include Nazi artifacts, footage of Nazi rallies, letters and personal items from victims of Hitler's "Final Solution," and an urn containing ashes of Holocaust victims, gathered at the extermination camps.
As you meander through the museum, you pass the warped and rusted frame of a Nazi truck, once used to transport Jewish bodies from the gas chambers to mass graves. A stone from a synagogue burned the Night of Broken Glass – Kristallnacht – sits beneath the quote from a Hitler stooge: "Today, I would not want to be a Jew in Germany." Encased in a transparent box in the floor, which you must pass, are hundreds of shoes shed by those headed to Hitler's gas chambers.
I came upon a display case which contained two long braids of light brown hair, a little bag with a Star of David embroidered on it and a photo of the Hirsch family. The braids belonged to Lili Hirsch, a twelve year old girl. I was suddenly reminded of my twelve year old granddaughter whose thick, wavy hair – with the exception of one year when she cut off her long tresses and donated them to an organization which makes hairpieces for children affected by cancer – has always been let to grow long.
Lili, with her mother, father and a brother was a resident of Tagu Mares, Transylvania. The Nazis had given an order that all Jewish residents of Tagu Mares must relocate to a ghetto. Lili's mother knew it would be difficult to keep Lili's long hair groomed with the conditions as they would be in the ghetto and convinced Lili to allow her to cut off the braids and give them, with other family belongings, to a neighbor for safekeeping.
After a few weeks in the ghetto, the family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where the father and brother were separated from Lili and her mother. Lili and her mother were sent to the gas chamber. Lili's father and brother, after separation, illness and harsh treatment were finally reunited in September 1945. When they returned to Tagu Mares, the only family possession they found was the little bag containing Lili's long braids. The braids lay on the shelf of this museum neatly displayed, neatly braided as though they had been cut yesterday, not more than seventy years ago.
An ongoing project of Yad Vashem is the search for names of those Jews who vanished in the Holocaust. Currently, of the estimated six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis – one and a half million of them children – four and one-half million names are known and commemorated at the museum's Hall of Names.
The children's memorial at Yad Vashem, located in an underground cavern, commemorates the children murdered in the Holocaust. Upon entering the memorial, you are greeted by photos of children, some smiling, some sober. Then you are plunged into darkness, with the exception of a single candle which, by a system of mirrors, surrounds you with millions of starlike lights. And as you pass through this darkness, about every eight seconds, a voice calls out a name: Paula Kolin, twelve years old, Poland...Ginette Alman, six years old, France...Herbert Gruen, thirteen years old, Austria...Svetlana Mishlimovich, three years old, Russia. If the names of all million and a half children were known, the reading of those names would take nearly 140 days.
Unfortunately, Yad Vashem is a reminder of a holocaust of the past, not a holocaust of the present. Since 1973, when the United States Supreme Court, in a case titled Roe v Wade, declared abortion under nearly all circumstances to be legal, about 60,000,000 Americans have been murdered.
Most who justify this holocaust argue that a woman has the legal right to decide what happens with her own body. Others who agree, however, say that abortion should not be used for birth control. Both camps see their intentions as good. But the result is the same – ten times the number of Hitler's murders.
If the United States had a memorial to those victims of our holocaust similar to the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem, reading the names of the dead through today would take more than fifteen years. The problem is that the list would never be completely read because the holocaust continues at the rate of almost 700,000 murders per year.
The link below will take you to the Abortion Clock: http://www.numberofabortions.com/
© Jim Terry
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