NEVER FORGET

This was not a people passively awaiting destruction. This was a vibrant, diverse civilization—secular and religious, Zionist and assimilationist, rich and poor. In Poland alone, there were 3.3 million Jews. They published newspapers, produced theater, debated philosophy, raised families.

When we say “six million,” we must understand each one was a person with a name, a face, a story. Each death was the end of a universe.

Each law seemed survivable. Each accommodation seemed reasonable.“It will pass.” “It could be worse.” “We have lived here for generations.”

The incremental nature of persecution is essential to understanding how it succeeded.

But more devastating than the violence was the response. The world did nothing.Many Germans did nothing—or helped. And the Jews themselves were forced to pay for the damage: one billion reichsmarks.

The message was clear: there would be no protection, no recourse, no rescue.

For those with eyes to see, Kristallnacht revealed the future. Many tried to flee. Most could not. The world closed its doors.

The ghettos were designed to kill through calculated neglect. Disease spread through crowded, unsanitary conditions. In Warsaw, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease before the deportations to death camps began.

And yet, life persisted. Secret schools operated. Underground newspapers circulated. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his team documented everything— collecting tens of thousands of documents, buried in milk cans and metal boxes, hidden for posterity.

“We know what awaits us. But we want the world to read and know.”

— Emanuel Ringelblum

The death camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek—were designed for one purpose: industrial murder. Trains arrived daily. SS doctors performed “selections” on the platform—left to labor, right to death. Most went right.

At Auschwitz, up to 6,000 people were gassed and cremated every day.

This was not madness. This was bureaucracy. Train schedules were coordinated. Zyklon B was ordered in quantities. Gold teeth were extracted, hair was collected, possessions were sorted. The genocide was administered like any other government program.

But resistance was also survival. It was Ringelblum burying his archive. It was parents teaching children in secret schools. It was maintaining religious observance in the camps. It was choosing how to die when death was certain.

And there were non-Jews who risked everything. Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. Oskar Schindler. Thousands of unknown helpers—hiding Jews in attics, barns, convents, at risk of death for themselves and their families.

They could not stop the Holocaust. But they proved that even in the darkest hour, human beings are capable of courage and compassion.

What the soldiers found defied comprehension. General Eisenhower ordered every available camera to document the horrors, predicting that future generations would deny.

“Get it all on record now. Get the films. Get the witnesses. Because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

— General Dwight D. Eisenhower

For survivors, liberation was not the end. They emerged into a world where their families had been murdered, their homes occupied, their communities erased. Many spent years in displaced persons camps. The psychological wounds would never fully heal.

This is not merely historical interest. Antisemitism is rising worldwide.Holocaust denial persists. The lessons of the Shoah—about the dangers of dehumanization, propaganda, bystander silence, the fragility of democracy—remain urgently relevant.

To remember is an act of resistance. To speak the names is to refuse erasure. To learn the history is to accept the obligation: this must never happen again. Not to Jews. Not to anyone.

The Holocaust was not inevitable. It was chosen—by perpetrators, by collaborators, by bystanders who did nothing. And it was resisted—by fighters, by rescuers, by those who maintained their humanity in inhuman conditions.

The question is not only “How could this happen?” but “How do we ensure it never happens again?”