The Holocaust hits very close to home for me. Two of my great grandparents were murdered by the Nazis. I am named after my grandmother’s sister, who was also killed.
This summer, I participated in a volunteer mission of forty Jewish college students and graduates, under the auspices of American Jewish World Service. We spent four weeks volunteering in a rural village in a developing country and three weeks in Ukraine. While there we had the opportunity to visit Babi Yar and Drabitsky Yar, two of the numerous Holocaust memorial sites that dot the map of Eastern Europe.
Babi Yar, in Kiev, was the site of the execution of 34,000 of Kiev’s Jewry within a two-day period in September 1941. Men, women, and children were summarily rounded up, brought to the ravine, and murdered. Within the next few months, the remainder of Kiev’s Jewry was killed as well.
At Drabitsky Yar, another ravine in Kharkov, 15,000 were killed between December 1941 and January 1942.
The history of the area is strikingly incongruous with what appears there now. Today at Babi Yar, trees bloom, and flowers grow. Aside from memorials, the ravines look like any you could find in Toronto. Evidence of the genocide exists in the memorials built by those who survived.
In Ukraine we spent our days working in the Jewish cemetery, restoring the overgrown, broken down gravesites. The combination of working in graveyards and visiting Holocaust sites led me to think about the role and the purpose of memory.
The Holocaust should be remembered and mourned by the whole world, not just the immediate families of the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and others who were victims of the Nazis. As a fellow participant on my trip said beautifully: “The Holocaust was not solely a tragedy for the people murdered. It is a tragedy for all of humankind that human beings could do this to each other.”Memory must have purpose. It must have direction. Memory of the past is only effective if we incorporate it into the present.
It is therefore fitting that Hillel has brought Stephen Lewis to speak on the crisis in Sudan as part of Holocaust Education Week, when the university community and schools everywhere are educated about what in Hebrew is called the Shoah. In the Darfur region of Sudan, a government-backed militia known as the Janjaweed has been engaging in genocidal campaigns to displace and murder African tribal farmers. Men are being murdered, women are being raped, and villages are being razed on a mass scale.
The militia has repeatedly blocked foreign aid groups from reaching the refugees. The number of confirmed dead so far is 100,000. The UN has already called Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis of our time.
This issue is particularly pertininent to Holocaust Education Week. As we remember those who perished from the Nazis’ heinous crimes, we should honour their memory by keeping it from happening again, as it already has in Bosnia and Rwanda.
In fifty years, no one should ask why the rest of the world stood by and watched the Sudanese crisis unfold, as we ask now about the Holocaust. Educate yourself and others about the issues. Wear a green ribbon to show support for the people of Darfur. Participate in one of many rallies taking place across the city and demand government intervention. Write to your MP. Draw up a petition and get it signed. Donate money to the relief effort.
The Holocaust was not a just a Jewish or European tragedy. Neither is the crisis in Sudan just a Sudanese or African tragedy. All of humanity should be speaking out about this horrific crime against humanity that is mounting.
Make your voice heard. Never again.
