April 23 (UPI) — Holocaust survivors, their families, federal officials and others joined to commemorate Holocaust victims during a Days of Remembrance event at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday morning.
The Days of Remembrance affirms the atrocities suffered by an estimated 6 million mostly Jewish people throughout Europe, whom the Nazis and their collaborators rounded up and exterminated in concentration camps.
Eighty years ago, on April 23, 1945, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower invited journalists, publishers and editors from the nation’s newspapers to take a 15-day tour of Nazi concentration camps, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Vice Chair Allan Holt said during Wednesday’s remembrance.
A bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers from a dozen states made a similar tour at the same time.
Firsthand evidence of atrocities
“They were there because, finally, the world now definitively determined that many of the reports about German atrocities could possibly be true,” Holt said.
Eisenhower 12 days earlier had visited one of the recently liberated concentration camps.
“Throughout the war, he read the intelligence reports describing the atrocities,” Holt said. “They seemed unthinkable, so he needed to see for himself. Seeing was believing.”
Eisenhower years later wrote of his tour of the concentration camp and said, “‘The things I saw beggar description,” Holt continued.
“‘The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick,'” Holt quoted Eisenhower.
Eisenhower said he needed to see the camp to “be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations purely to propaganda,'” Hall explained.
“Eisenhower could not have imagined social media,” Holt said, “but he most definitely understood human nature. We know this all too well as Holocaust denial continues to grow with each passing year.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also addressed attendees during the morning event.
He pointed to the regimental flags of U.S. military units that liberated concentration camps and said those flags and the U.S. Capitol represent justice for those who survived the Holocaust and their families.
“Today we gather to mourn the loss of 6 million innocent people,” Lutnick said.
“We gather to remember the horrors that these people lived through,” he said. “But we gather not to just remember what happened but to make sure that it never happens again.”
Here again to bear witness
Holocaust Memorial Council member Abraham Foxman, who survived the Holocaust and its concentration camps, addressed his fellow survivors.
“We are here again today to bear witness,” Foxman said. “The killing of Europe’s Jews ended eight decades ago, but the memories never end. The legacies never end, and the lessons must never, never end.”
He cited the “loss of everything we cherished, our families, friends, communities, the betrayal of our neighbors, we worked quickly to rebuild our lives” and focused on the future.
“But the past was always with us, as it is today and as it will always be,” Foxman said.
He commended the United States for supporting the National Holocaust Museum and creating the annual Days of Remembrance event to ensure future generations do not forget the past.
“As a survivor, I am horrified at the explosion of anti-Semitism, global and in the U.S.,” Foxman said.
He commended President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump for their efforts to oppose anti-Semitism.
He also expressed concern about the government’s current immigration enforcement efforts and efforts to ban books and “dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach.”
“I am troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized,” Foxman said. “As some of you know, I was born at the wrong time and the wrong place as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940.”
He said he survived due to one person’s kindness and “several miracles,” which led him to question why the Holocaust happened and why he was not among 1.5 million Jewish children who died.
“Those who were in a position of power to make decisions to stop what was happening knew,” Foxman said. “They knew every day how many Jews were being killed. They knew, and for years previously, they knew what was happening.”
He said American leaders also knew but did little to stop it.
“It’s extremely important to know, but knowing is not enough,” he said. “Wherever good people stood up to hate and said, ‘No,’ Jews lived, gays lived, Roma lived.”
The event concluded with a lighting of remembrance candles by members of the U.S. military.
Daily readings of Holocaust victims’ names
Daily readings of the names of those murdered in the concentration camps are scheduled from 10 a.m. EDT to 4:30 p.m. at the Holocaust Museum’s second-floor Hall of Remembrance through Friday.
“Reading the names of Holocaust victims during Days of Remembrance is an especially meaningful way to honor those who were killed,” the National Holocaust Museum’s event notice says.
“Museum visitors are welcome to read names from their own connections to this history or names provided from historical records,” the event description says. “You may also listen to names being read and light a memorial candle.”
The free event is open to the general public throughout the week with no registration required.
National Day of Remembrance
President Donald Trump earlier marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on Jan. 27 by declaring a National Day of Remembrance.
“Between 1940 and 1945, more than one million Jews, religious leaders, disabled persons and other innocent victims were viciouslyand mercilessly executed in Auschwitz at the hands of the evil Nazi regime – culminating in one of the darkest chapters in human history,” Trump announced.
“On this solemn day, America joins the Jewish community, the people of Poland, and the entire world in mourning the lives lost, the souls battered, the heroes forgotten, and the countless men and women who gave their lives for the cause of freedom.”
Trump on April 25, 2017, also held a Days of Remembrance commemoration at the White House to honor the millions of victims of the Nazi atrocities in European concentration camps.
Congress in 1980 established the Days of Remembrance as an annual commemoration of Holocaust victims to help affirm the atrocities that occurred and created the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to oversee annual remembrance activities.
The National Holocaust Museum is located at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, in Washington, D.C.
