Remembering the Holocaust is crucial to stem the tide of antisemitism here and abroad
In sacred memory of the 6 million …
Columbia’s Holocaust Memorial offers a detailed timeline of the years before and just after World War II and the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, and other camps built for the same sinister purpose.
But the images on the memorial, designed to give even those unable to read an idea of what atrocities took place, are perhaps more haunting.
They depict a man’s gaunt face behind barbed wire, a crematorium with smoke coming from its chimney and men, women and children wearing the Star of David on their clothing as they get out of a cattle car toward an unknown fate.
Dr. Lilly S Filler, Chair of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, who worked on the effort to erect a memorial here, said it was important that anyone could visit the memorial and walk away with some understanding of what took place.
Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the need for that understanding remains.
“We’re seeing a rise in antisemitism. We’re seeing a rise in overt antisemitism worldwide,” Filler said.
Her parents, now deceased, were among the survivors of the Holocaust. They moved to South Carolina when Filler was a child.
Filler’s father Ben Stern was liberated from Allach, a sub camp of Dachau by the American Allies on April 30, 1945. Her mother Jadzia Szklarz Stern was liberated from Leipzig by the Soviet army in early May 1945.
Both were initially sent to Auschwitz, her mother in August 1943 and her father in August 1944.
Erecting the memorial was important to them, Filler said, because it offered a way to show that even here, thousands of miles away, there were community members living with memories of the Holocaust.
But the presence of memorials in places like Columbia, South Carolina isn’t enough as year after year surveys find knowledge of the Holocaust and the events that led to it continues to decline.
In 2018, for instance, Smithsonian Magazine reported that a survey found, “A substantial number of the survey’s respondents were unaware of basic facts about the Holocaust. Forty-one percent did not know what Auschwitz was. Nearly one-third of respondents (31 percent) believed that less than 2 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust; the actual number is closer to 6 million.”
NBC News reported just last September that a nationwide survey showed “a ‘worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge’ among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word ‘Holocaust’ before.”
Those statistics should concern all of us.
“(Antisemitism used to be on the fringes, but now it’s coming into the mainstream,” Filler said. “It’s not a problem of the past. It’s a problem of the present.”
That’s why observances like today’s remain crucial.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers more on how to learn about the Holocaust and is using social media including the hashtag #HolocaustRemembranceDay to reach a wider audience.
In addition to visiting the museum website, Filler urged South Carolinians to speak up when they encounter bigotry and hatred, to visit Memorial Park and to visit the state’s Holocaust education website.
Her words etched on a bench at the Columbia memorial, survivor Cela Miller stressed the importance of remembering.
“Do not take your families for granted; keep them close to you. No matter how we feel today, what we lived through can happen again. We must never forget.”
