Holocaust survivors call for end to war in Gaza. Israelis gather on Holocaust Memorial Day

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza


‘We have lost our humanity’: Holocaust survivors call for end to war in Gaza

Israelis are gathering on Holocaust Memorial Day to speak out against Palestinian starvation and suffering

Fri 25 Apr 2025 09.43 EDT

Few days speak so profoundly to the soul of Israel than Holocaust Memorial Day. As the country sat in silence on Thursday to remember six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, the same refrain was, as always, repeated by many: never again.

But for some across Israel, as the war in Gaza continues to ravage the Palestinian people and wipe out entire families, never again had come to hold another meaning.

As the country’s most powerful politicians, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a ceremony on Thursday morning at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, three Holocaust survivors in their 80s stood at the entrance holding a sign aloft: “If we have lost our compassion for the other, we have lost our humanity.”

About 40 miles (64km) away in a square in central Tel Aviv, thousands, including descendants of Holocaust survivors, stood holding photos of Palestinian children who had been killed since the war began. Dozens more lined the roads of the city dressed in black, holding out empty pots to symbolise the starvation of those in Gaza.

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[IrishBubbaLiberal]

1. I sometimes go look at Holocaust memorials online for individuals

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220038228

Never.

Never Forget.

Never Again.

https://bsky.app/profile/auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social/post/3lidguuzjub2c

17 February 1883 | A Czech Jewish woman Irma Hoffmannová was born.

She was deported to #Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto on 28 October 1944. After selection she was murdered in a gas chamber.

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I may not be Jewish, but very likely many many of my Czech or Bohemian relatives were, and many perished in the Holocaust.

Unfortunately I have not visited Prague (yet), but my late mother and father did
back just after the Soviet Union fell.

Also my siblings, thre of them, and some of their adult children have too.


Pinkas Synagogue

On the walls are the names.

And my family name.
Over and over and over….my family name is there.

https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/explore/sites/pinkas-synagogue/

[NNadir]

2. I did not know that there were survivors left. By survival, they spoke for all humanity, as do all genocide victims.

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

3. A childhood neighbor of my wife, was a Holocaust survivor

His arm had visible tattoo number.

Just a couple years ago he died peacefully an old man.

In the 1960s, My wife and his daughter were childhood playmates,
Since they lived only 2 houses away

[NNadir]

4. My first boss, when I was at the age of 16, was a survivor. He ran a sandwich shop.

He never spoke of it, but he had the tattoo. At the age of 16, I really didn't grasp what it meant. It seemed mysterious.

He was a gentle person, a wonderful man, spoke good, but highly accented English.

He didn't speak of what he'd been through, and I wouldn't have had the courage to ask if I understood, which, at the time I didn't.

The last time I saw him, he'd opened another shop, about 10 years after I worked there. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was a chemist, and he asked me a question that shot right through me.

"For good or for bad?"

I have had to ask myself that question at times.