Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. By sheer coincidence, or through some sort of subconscious trick, I just finished re-reading the book Voyage of the Damned, the story of the ship carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 that was refused entry into Cuba or the United States and so most of the refugees were returned to Europe...mostly to their ultimate deaths in concentration camps. I want to mix in my thoughts on Voyage of the Damned with something I wrote last year on Yom HaShoah, and remind us all that "Never Again" has yet to be achieved and that we bear a responsibility to not fall into the same trap that people fell into in the 1930's and 1940's.

And the anti-immigration mood in the United States of the late 1930's bears a considerable resemblance to the anti-immigrant mood today, and Voyage of the Damned is as much a condemnation of the inaction of the United States as it is a condemnation of what was happening in Europe.

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.  read more »

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.  read more »