WIESBADEN, Germany -- Could it have been prevented?
This was the question posed at U.S. Army Garrison Wiesbaden's annual Days of Remembrance ceremony April 17 at the Tony Bass Auditorium.
The ceremony, hosted by the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade, brought together the American military community and leaders from Wiesbaden's Jewish community to explore the past and honor those who lost their lives during "a time when darkness and evil engulfed the earth, when life was made cheap and killing of innocents commonplace," as Rabbi (Cpt.) David Ruderman put it during his invocation.
"We remember those who were murdered, so many, cut down before their time because they were targeted by a twisted and violent world view," he continued. "We remember as well the heroes of those times, men and women in uniform, who rose to confront evil and fought to restore sanity to the world. Even as we grieve, we are proud to be a part of that legacy and to follow in those footsteps."
A video by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. titled "Never Again: Heeding the Warning Signs" depicting the events leading up to the Holocaust, such as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was shown to illustrate that hindsight truly is 20/20. Looking back, the signs leading to genocide are clear, according to the video -- but society must learn from the past to prevent a Holocaust from happening ever again.
Afterward, seven-year-old Emilie Riley lit six candles -- one symbolizing the six million Jews murdered; one for the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis; one in commemoration of the ghetto fighters and partisans in the forests; one in honor of the small minority of non-Jewish Europeans who risked their own lives to save Jews from the claws of the Nazis; one in commemoration of the survivors of the Holocaust who after the horror of the Nazi regime built up a new existence for themselves; and the last will be lit in honor of the state of Israel which has become the homeland for the Jewish people. The candles were yellow, like the arm band Jews were forced to wear during the Nazi regime.
Volunteers read the stories of Holocaust survivors and heroes.
One in particular hit close to home. Mackenzie Riley, 11, recounted the story of her great-grandmother, Andzia Szpilman, a true survivor who endured four years in a Lodz, Poland ghetto with her family, followed by time in concentration camps Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Salzwedel.
As conditions became progressively worse and food became scarce in the ghetto, she and her sister survived by eating weeds for extra nutrition. At Auschwitz, she narrowly escaped death when the Nazis sent everyone directly in front of her to the gas chambers.
At Salzwedel labor camp, she and the foreman on the bullet-making assembly line helped undermine the Nazi war by making the bullets a fraction too big, causing them to get stuck in the barrel. They made some good bullets and put them on top of the defective ones to fool the Nazis. After liberation, she met her husband, Jacob, at a displaced persons camp and married a few weeks later.
"It feels good to talk about her," said Mackenzie. "I never got to know her that well. I think it's cool she survived something like that. She lost almost her whole family."
Finally, Rabbi Avraham Zeev Nussbaum from the Wiesbaden Synagogue sang a prayer in Hebrew, swaying slowly side to side as his voice rang out in the silent room. He said he felt at ease reciting the prayer in the company of U.S. Army Soldiers.
"What's most important is to remember the politics," he said. "Every Soldier and every citizen must be confronted with the question, 'What can I do?' to not repeat this in the world."
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