75 years ago, on this day, Soviet soldiers of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. There, more than one million people were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators—at least 960,000 of them being Jews. And at least one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust perished at Auschwitz.
Being a young Palestinian born in the Middle-East, I kept hearing people around me and on TV denying the “Holocaust”, claiming it’s a hoax among many other things. At the time before 2006, I had no idea what it was and, because we had no internet, I had no way of searching and finding out for myself. It’s not even mentioned in our history books in school. All I’d heard was denial with no way of finding out the truth until one day I stumbled upon a book which was brought accidentally by my father from Be’er Sheva where he works there as a laborer.
That book is called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Through this book, I was able to really learn about the Holocaust. This book was a turning point in my life where I learned that our attitude is our choice, and it's the only thing that can't be taken away from us. Viktor Frankl's mother, father, brother, and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. He lost everything, he said, that could be taken from a prisoner, except one thing: ''the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.''
Learning about all that Viktor and everyone who was imprisoned at that camp had gone through made me feel ashamed of everyone who continues to deny this tragedy and the fact that I didn’t find out the truth earlier—being misinformed for such a long time. It is a book which I recommend everyone to read.
I can never covey the real pain and suffering of those courageous people and what they really went through in those camps, but we (no matter to what religion we belong to) must acknowledge their pain, feel for them, and listen to their stories. We must educate ourselves as we have the means to do so today so history will never repeat itself. We are the generation that needs to stand up, to remind the world to never forget and never deny, and that “never again” means never again for anyone. We at CRC join millions to say on this important day: we remember.