Teenagers of all faiths remember Holocaust
The warmth which encompassed every faith community in Liverpool yesterday embraced elderly survivors of the Holocaust and victims' relatives at a memorial concert in the city. There to welcome them were teenage Jews, Christians, Hindus and - for the first time in an official capacity - Muslims who had been on a "walk of faith" to call for tolerance, friendship, and the sanctity of individual life.
"The Holocaust was not so much six million deaths as one death six million times," said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, taking up the theme which won Liverpool the honour of hosting National Holocaust Memorial Day this year.
He and Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Commonwealth chief rabbi, prayed together by a huge heap of spectacles, sent to Liverpool town hall from across the world and piled on a set of railway tracks like the infamous ones at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
"This is the darkness," said Liverpool councillor Tina Gould, who worked for a year to organise the mixture of religious service, music, poetry and drama, before visiting Auschwitz earlier this month. "As a Jew and as someone who loves Liverpool, I find it very hard to bear. But look, here is the light."
She opened one of the big, mahogany doors of the town hall and colour flooded in from thousands of paper butterflies - an age-old symbol of the human spirit - made by children in honour of named individuals who died in the Nazi camps.
The main commemoration at the Philharmonic Hall, on Hope Street, which unites the two once warring cathedrals, also dealt in names rather than numbers. The packed audience listened to music by Hans Krasa, who died at Auschwitz, and Hans Gal, who escaped and ended up in Liverpool interned as an "enemy alien" during the war, but was shown around the city by friendly Scouser guards.
Martin Bell, the former independent MP and BBC reporter in the Balkans, then introduced the true story of Bosko and Admira, the Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo whose love was destroyed by the hatred between Serbs and Bosnians.
Tahira, 15, a Muslim who joined Catholic, Anglican and Hindu teenagers on the faith walk, said: "That is what we must prevent, and we do it by meeting together and making friends - simple, and just what we do in Liverpool's youth council."
Via The Guardian
See also: Liverpool Hosts Holocaust Memorial Day
H/T NYNana
Holocaust should not be forgotten - Czech president
Prague- The extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime should not be forgotten and should remain an everlasting memento, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said today at a meeting in the Czech Senate commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Today it may be more necessary to recall the crimes against humanity committed against the Jewish population than decades ago because of the efforts to re-write the past and use its false picture for political purposes, Klaus said.
"We do not do this only for historical piety, but also for our future. We do this to prevent similar monstrous crimes against humanity from ever repeating," he said.
"The genocide of European Jews must not be forgotten and must remain an everlasting memento. This memento will remind us of the evil that people are capable to commit against each other. It should be a memento that will strengthen our belief in the fundamental importance of human freedom because it is the only guarantee that similar tragic events will never repeat," Klaus said.
The Holocaust, an international word that is not quite understandable in the Czech language, is used by Czechs to describe "may be the most awful and shameful crime in human history," Klaus said.
"However, I fear whether this one foreign word could complicate our possibility to sufficiently realise and feel the whole depth of monstrosity of what had happened then, the monstrosity of the extermination of European Jews by the German Nazi regime," Klaus said.
The modern time and its problems make the historical experience from the Holocaust distant for new generations, he said.
"We have experience with the efforts to re-write the past, replace the committers and victims, compare their sufferings and politically abuse a false picture of the past thus created," Klaus said.
"That is why it is necessary to point to the importance to commemorate the Holocaust victims today, may be even more than in the past," Klaus said.
He appreciated that not only Jewish organisations commemorate the Holocaust victims.
Klaus pointed to the significance of the passing of a law by the Czech parliament five years ago that made Holocaust Remembrance Day a memorial day in the Czech Republic.
This day became an opportunity for all to remember the common lesson from the tragedy of the Nazi "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," Klaus said.
Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust in the World War Two, is celebrated on January 27, the day of the liberation of the Osvetim (Auschwitz) Nazi extermination camp.
In the Czech Republic, like in most European Union member states, it has been marked since 2004.
"The day reminds us that evil should be destructed on the start and that the roots of extremism do not lie in any concrete ideology, concrete religion or concrete national community," Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek (senior governing Civic Democrats, ODS) today said in a statement CTK received.
The special session in the Senate today was attended by Senate chairman Premysl Sobotka (ODS), Chamber of Deputies chairman Miloslav Vlcek (senior opposition Social Democrats, CSSD) and other guests.
Sobotka said that it was necessary to constantly mobilise all decent people for the opposition against evil and warned against the "underestimation of new dark risks."
Karel Holomek, chairman of the Association of Moravian Romanies, said that the fates of Jews and Romanies were similar during the Holocaust.
"This shows that the monstrosity of racist theories and their implementation should never be forgotten," he said.
Via ČeskéNoviny.cz/ČTK
Video courtesy of jluis333
The Wannsee Conference took place on October 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannssee. In the HBO film, Conspiracy, Kevin Branagh portrays SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, architect of The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Stanley Tucci portrayed Heydrich's able assistant, SS Colonel Adolph Eichmann; and Colin Firth presented a chilling performance as Dr. Wilhelm Stukart, representing the Reich Ministry of Justice. In this clip, Stukart gives an impassioned defense of the Nuremberg Laws and well he should -- he was the principal author.
The Reality of the Jew
Conspiracy | HBO Films
Video courtesy of HenryvKeiper
