January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, has been designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The UN urges us each year to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Europe, and millions more victims of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and expand education systems to help prevent genocide in the long run.
So, to answer your call, here are some of the sites, museums and monuments that pay tribute to those who suffered the Holocaust, one of the most unfathomable events in human history.
Traveling to the sites is the best thing to witness the Holocaust, and it is in this spirit that I have traveled to camps, museums, and memorials around the world.
In 1965, 20 years after the liberation of the concentration camps, I visited the Dachau concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. Germans who had lived through the war passed by the photographs in a new museum there, shaking their heads with evident disbelief at the atrocities. Most of those other people were Nazis, but they seemed normal. And that understanding made my first close look at this terrible story indelible.
In 1995, 50 years after the exterminations, I visited the Buchenwald concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar, Germany, which is more horrible than the Dachau concentration camp. At the end of the war, Buchenwald was the largest concentration camp in the German Reich and more than 56,000 people died there as a result of torture, medical experiments and phthisis.
That same year, I visited the most notorious camp of all: Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. Auschwitz I, the building that basically housed political prisoners and terrible objects such as the hair of the inmates and piles of shoes.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, a mixture of concentration camp and extermination camp, which basically housed Jews.
Apart from the long railway line and the terminus, the remaining structures are scattered over a giant area. Most of the fuel chambers were destroyed by the Nazis when they learned they had lost the war, and crematoria are often heaps of rubble. the barracks remain intact, with stacked wooden shelves where other people slept, several crammed into stacked shelves.
At Auschwitz Majdanek, a separate site, visitors can see the horrors of fuel chambers, barracks, crematoria, and a huge mountain of ashes, all on the outskirts of Krakow, overlooking residential houses.
An organized excursion will come with an expert guide or survivor, with transportation between other parts of the camp after liberation. But I walked in Auschwitz last afternoon and I may feel the presence of millions of men, women and children murdered without guilt. I worked as a ghostwriter with an Auschwitz survivor who wanted to tell her story and pay tribute to her by visiting the barracks where she had lived.
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Many Holocaust museums and memorials around the world offer exhibits. The Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C. es one of the best. And my son Cary hosts exhibits at the Kuperberg Holocaust Center in Queens. NEW YORK. The existing one, practically available at the moment, is that of “Concentration Camps”.
At Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, thousands of concrete slabs, some more than six feet high and placed like dominoes on other levels, give the turbulence and uncertainty of that era a position of contemplation, of reminiscence, and also of warning.
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Warsaw, Poland, is home to Europe’s largest and deadliest ghetto, a remote domain where Jews were forced to live under Nazi occupation. Since 1940, 400,000 Jews were confined in a 3. 4-square-kilometer gated community in terrible conditions. This equates to about 8 other people consistent with the room.
With that of the Polish partisans, the Jews rose up in armed resistance in 1943 and held the Germans for several weeks until the Germans razed the ghetto, killing 13,000 people. A total of 392,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were killed, most of them after deportation to the Treblinka death camp.
I visited the site, the Monument to heroes and “The Walkway of Memory”, which connects two smaller ghettos. Photos of the sick are shown in the buildings as you walk the streets.
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In the center of Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House is where the now mythical Anne and her circle of relatives lived in hiding in World War II to avoid persecution. Living with them, lived some other circle of relatives, the van Pels; and later, a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. Anne Frank’s celebrated diary, written while in hiding, documents her mind and emotions as an aspiring teenager; sometimes, strangely and endearing with hope.
Tragically, the organization betrayed and was transferred to concentration camps. Anne died of an illness in 1945, a few days after her sister Margo, towards the end of the war. His diary was found out and published through his father, Otto, the only member of the organization. who survived the Holocaust.
The Anne Frank House is now a real museum. Visitors can see the library that hid the annex where they lived. The museum has collected items and photographs that belonged to the family, and Anne Frank’s original diary is on display.
I made a stop in 1965, before the structure of the fashionable structure that houses artifacts, and before the crowd. We can simply climb the stairs to the secret annex and enter the premises quietly.
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Some sites offer hope.
In 2016 I visited Le Chambon, a French village an hour’s drive from Lyon. His heroic story is too rare. A few days after Nazi Germany invaded France and established the dividing line separating northern occupied France from Vichy-occupied France, Pastor du Chambon urged villagers to action: “When our enemies demand it, we will act in a way that counters the teachings of the Gospel. We will do it without fear, without pride and without hatred.
The French Huguenots (Calvinists) of this region chose their brothers “People of God” regardless of their devout or ethnic origin. Perhaps they offered safe haven and kindness in part because they too had been the object of devout persecution for many years.
But for that matter, parishioners took in Jewish refugees, many of them children. Villagers welcomed them into their homes, educated them in their public schools, and hid them from periodic raids — a haven of kindness in difficult times.
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Some of you may have noticed the movie, Schindler’s List. Oscar Schindler, a German businessman living in Krakow, Poland. He hired Jews, providing them with cover for the expulsion from the Nazi party. Schindler had intelligent relations with the SS and claimed that he needed the Jews because they charge less and that his paintings are “necessary for the German war effort. “
As a result, thousands of Jews who worked in his factory avoid being transported to death camps.
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Yad Vashem translates to “the hand of God. ” This monument in Jerusalem is a living tribute to the victims of the Holocaust who did not get a burial. Exhibits feature photographic stories written and spoken through victims, survivors’ remains, art installations, and data panels.
One aspect is committed to the youth of the Holocaust; it remains in the dark.
And even more, we spoke with Allan Hall, who survived the Holocaust as a child, hiding with his circle of relatives in Poland. He tells his terrifying story in episode 50 of my podcast, Places I Remember.
“I need other people to remember it,” he says. And you’ll probably never know the bravery, ingenuity, and luck that treasured him and his family.