Holocaust Remembrance Day

My Dear Sisters and Brothers:

The Holocaust or Shoah was the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during the Second World War (1939-1945).  It was a state-sponsored systematic extermination of the Jewish population which at the time numbered 9,000,000 citizens throughout the European continent. Two-thirds of them were killed. More than a million were Jewish children; another two million were Jewish women; and the remainder were three million Jewish men. The Nazis created a network of more than 40,000 facilities in Germany and the German-occupied territories to concentrate, hold and exterminate Jews and their other victims.

Besides the genocide against the Jewish population, the German government also carried out the mass murder of the Romani (Gypsies), people with disabilities, and large numbers of Polish and Russian citizens, as well as Soviet soldiers and homosexuals. It is estimated that Hitler's Nazi regime intentionally murdered some ten to eleven million civilians and prisoners of war. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics that led to the detention, internment and extermination of these people, thus turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state."

As Catholics who also believe in the God of our Jewish ancestors in the faith and treasure the Hebrew Testament, we need to remember the Jewish people and others who were murdered in the Holocaust. April 27-28 is set aside each year as HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY to recall all those slain by the Nazi government. That commemoration needs to be equally important to us as it is to the Jewish people.

Obviously, many questions surface about who was responsible for this heinous crime against the Jewish people and the many others who suffered extermination by the Nazi government. Who authorized the killings in the first place? Who knew about them? Who spoke out against the murders and who collaborated? Who actually carried out the killings? What nations besides Germany were complicit in the Holocaust?

Just as important are the questions about who rescued the Jews both in Germany and in the German-occupied countries. Who hid them, cared for them, risked their lives and the lives of their families for them? And who died for them?

It is important to have days like the HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY so that we will never be able to forget what happened to the victims and the survivors. It is also necessary to have the opportunity to ask such questions as: How and why did this atrocity occur? Could it happen again? Do we remember twenty years ago the mass genocide in Rwanda where more than one million people were deliberately murdered by their fellow citizens because of their ethnicity?

As Catholics, we are called to live the teachings of Jesus as proclaimed in the four Gospels. Should we not, therefore, join our Jewish friends and others to share in the HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY so that we might never forget what happened and can work together to prevent it from ever happening again?

Fraternally in the Lord,